


Split Ends

by kohakuyume94



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tangled (2010) Fusion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Human Experimentation, Inspired by Tangled (2010), M/M, Medical Experimentation, Mokuton, Tenzou (Naruto) as Rapunzel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-05-10 10:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14735363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kohakuyume94/pseuds/kohakuyume94
Summary: Kinoe had only known the safety of his tower, of course that was all his father had allowed him to know. But, when mission of a certain silver-haired ANBU causes him to cross paths with the shut-in - both their lives take a drastic turn.Kakayama Tangled AU





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! So, originally this was supposed to be my last entry for Kakayama Week 2018, but then I got super behind and super busy and it never happened. But, in all actuality, I guess that was for the better, because in the time that I was busy and unable to write it - the one-shot turned into a whole fic! What can I say - I have no self control! 
> 
> With that - I have decided to just post the chapters for this one as I write them - which is normally not how I roll at all. So, hopefully this still turns out cohesive! We shall see!
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Thank you for reading, and as always, I welcome your comments! 
> 
> Oh - and many thanks to Tumblr's sortakindabadlyfreezerburned and berry-doodles for the inspiration/encouragement to write this piece even though Kakayama Week had ended (although, let's be honest, every week is Kakayama week in my heart). Also - a big thank you to tumblr's jvsfit23 and keepyourpantsongohan for the title suggestions!
> 
> You should def check out the adorable and beautiful piece from sortakindabadlyfreezerburned that features this AU - it's fantastic!

(click [here](https://sortakindabadlyfreezerburned.tumblr.com/post/173910577111) for the cute art mentioned above)

* * *

 

 

7:00. Sunlight broke through the single window opening of Kinoe’s tower, warm beams shining in brilliant shafts through leaves as they gently swayed in the morning breeze. The young man stretched awake, smacking his lips against morning breath, and blinking wide eyes open to find himself at the start of another long, empty day. Still, he managed a smile, and Fishcake, his orange tabby uncurled himself from Kinoe’s side, rolling over to expose his belly for morning scratches.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” the teen chuckled, happily meeting the demands of his purring companion. “Come on now, we should go and greet the day.”

Fishcake mewed rather lazily in protest as Kinoe pulled himself from the coziness of covers, taking his body heat with him. The feline’s tune stayed unchanged as food was scooped into his bowl. Kinoe sighed, hands on his hips.

“We go through this every morning - you’re not getting ramen for breakfast.”

Fishcake stared, wide-eyed and wanting.

“Maybe later tonight.”

Taking this bargain, Fishcake resigned himself to his homemade kitty kibble, his master grinning and rolling his eyes. Kinoe then moved to take up his watering can and bring breakfast to his many plants, before starting the morning chores.

Each day started the same, as long as he could remember - waking alone, taking care of the household, his father already having descended their tower, slipping outside their secret barrier and going into town to work. He hardly minded though. The quiet gave him what little freedom he knew - singing, reading, talking to his plants, teasing Fishcake with feathers and yarn, and of course, a bit of secret training. He also used this opportunity to pull his hair up and back into a massively thick, folded braid. Having all 22 meters of it out from under his feet gave Kinoe new life, and, despite the heavy weight of it pulling down on his head, the brunette flitted like a sparrow around his tower.

This morning, he needed his hair out of the way for more urgent needs than simple freedom of motion. This morning, he set out, determined to prepare the presentation of his secret training to finally show his father. This morning, marked the day he would petition to take a trip down from the tower.

It’d been fourteen years since Kinoe had last been out of the tower, and five years since he’d asked. The last request had been vehemently denied, and when Kinoe has been caught after, trying to sneak down on his own, met with the burning of his every last plant, as well as a month without sunlight. But, the years had given the boy time for his hopes to take root again, and flourish into courage once more in the long stretches of lonely day. So now, on the doorstep of his birthday and adulthood, Kinoe prepared anxiously at ask once more to journey down from the tower, and out to see the floating lanterns that filled the sky on his birthday evening each year.

6 o’clock came, and the white head of one of his father’s snakes poked it’s head through the window, having slithered up the vines on the side of their tower, and alerted Kinoe that his father was ready and waiting below. Kinoe inhaled deep, attempting to soothe his building nerves, as he released the length of his hair back down in a massive pile at his ankles, accidentally burying Fishcake in the heap at the same time.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-here…”

Large olive eyes scowled hard into Kinoe once the feline had been dug free.

Just then, the white snake struck warningly at the young man’s bare feet, urging him to pick up the pace and retrieve his father below.

In a rush now, Kinoe sent Fishcake away with the promise of a special treat later, and, just has he did every evening, tossed the full length of his hair over the large hook dangling just outside their window. Weight yanked against his scalp, and Kinoe knew his father had grabbed hold, ready to be pulled up.

“Kinoe,” his father smiled, slipping through the window, and hastily drawing inward. “How’s my little flower this evening?”

“I’m doing well,” Kinoe answered earnestly, despite the lump rising fast rising in his throat. “How was work?”

His father moved in closer, sharp yellow eyes darting over his son in inspection.

“Exhausting,” He exhaled, extending a slender, albino hand and running it through Kinoe’s hair, and tipping his head downward to place a lingering kiss atop the silky brown. The man sighed happily, giving a gentle shake of his own black locks and pale body. “You don’t look very well, little flower.”

A cold palm pressed into Kinoe’s burning forehead, and, as if on cue, his breath began to shallow out.

“I’m alright, father,” he assured, crossing back to their window and out of reach. “I-I wanted to talk to you about something - if I could...”

His father simply raised an eyebrow, allowing his son to continue his messy petition.

Kinoe fought for air, forcing his shoulders to square up as he pulled his hair off the window hook and back inside. From across the room, he caught eyes with Fishcake, orange head poking out from a leafy fern as if to offer silent support.

“I guess, first, I have something to show you. Now, you might be upset at first, but, I promise, once you see what I’ve accomplished, you’ll be-”

“Kinoe,” his father started, frustration stretching his tone taut. “What’s this all about?”

“Just, please,” Kinoe continued, raising his hands. “Watch?”

Closing his eyes and inhaling deep, the young man brought his hands together, weaving a sign in front of his chest and conjuring up a wooden clone of himself.

His father’s eyes lit with rage, teeth grinding with a growl, thin white lips splitting open around them to reveal the glint of pointed fangs.

“ _Kinoe_! What do you think you’re doing?!” He roared.

“Please, father, just watch. I’ve been training so hard for the past few years - I’ve gotten strong! Let me show you!”

Kinoe posed himself against his clone and began sparring, his body quickly robbing him of the effects of his training, leaving him drenched in sweat, gasping for air, weak-muscled and foggy-minded.

 _Please._ Kinoe besieged himself. _Not now._

Taking on the weakness of his body as a second opponent, the teen bore relentlessly into his show of strength and skill, determined to fight through, desperate to prove that he could endure a trip down from the tower, that he could endure the danger of the world below.

“ _Enough!_ ” His father bellowed, a livid hiss quick to follow as a brood of snakes burst free of his tunic, latching themselves onto the dueling pair before him. Venom surged under Kinoe’s skin, his body going numb and slumping into the floor as his wood clone vanished into a smoky wisp.

“I’ve worked so hard...” Kinoe croaked as his father charged forward, scooping him up and ordering his silence. “I wanted to surprise you, to make you proud. I wanted-“

“You wanted to try and prove your ability to go outside, didn’t you?”

Kinoe ached for the ability to scream, to finally rage against the iron will of his father.

“ _Didn’t you?!”_

It wasn’t fair. He’d trained tirelessly for years with no flair of his illness. He was turning eighteen this year. He should be allowed this one simple freedom. He just wanted to watch the lanterns from a boat on the lake. He just wanted to pretend for a moment.

Instead, Kinoe opened his mouth, a strained squeal though his throat as his only rebuttal.

His father groaned in disgust, tossing his son down in the tangled of knotted brown, swiping his hand through the air to dismiss his snakes.

“Foolish child… You know why we stay up here – we stay up here for _you_ – to keep you safe and well! You are not strong enough to survive in the world down there, Kinoe. Look at you!”

Fishcake snuck out from his cover amongst the fern leaves, slowly slinking toward his master as father lit into son.

“You call that depressing display the fruits of your labor for the last several years? You couldn’t even spar against yourself!”

“That wasn’t at all what I’m capable of now, father,” Kinoe defended weakly, body starting to regain its feeling and falling into the depths of fatigue. “I didn’t even get to show you my trained mokuton…”

“Please, those garden tricks?” his father scoffed. “As if that pathetic ability would ever be able to be of any real use in combat. Come out of this fantasy-land at once. You are _ill_. You do not get to leave this tower because you will _never_ be strong enough to handle what’s down there – you can’t even handle yourself! Tonight has proved that.”

Tears burned against Kinoe’s squeezed eyelids.

“Please… I just want to see the floating lanterns… Just one night… You could keep me well, protect me… Please, father…”

Silence stretched between them, father taking up the chin of his son to look into his eyes as he knelt close.

“I do those things best from here, Kinoe.”

The tears slipped out with a single sob.

“I’m sorry that I have to be the villain to you. I know you must hate me for it.”

A cold hand caressed back through Kinoe’s hair.

“But, I’m just trying to protect my sweet, little flower…”

Fishcake made his way to nuzzle against his master’s leg, being shooed away immediately by Kinoe’s father.

“You just can’t understand what kind of trechery the outside world holds… So much death, and destruction, war and deceit… A world of shinobi soldiers sneaking about, killing one another in the most brutal ways with no end in sight… Think of your mother, your sister, our whole clan... I know you were too young to remember... such a bloody, senseless massacre it was... I barely escaped with you...”

“I know...” Kinoe murmured. He sniffed hard in the quiet moment that followed. Somewhere in the dizzy swim of his deep memory, the cry of his people echoed, and then, ringing clearly, his mother’s scream.

“But beyond that...”

Kinoe snapped back into reality.

“You are ill. We never know when a flare up is going to come. I’m trying as hard as I can to develop a cure for you, but until we can get something working, we can’t risk your wellness in and already perilous world... I will not lose you.”

“But...”

His father’s tone dropped, a kind of thick sadness melting over it and he knelt back down to pet lovingly again through brown locks.

“I’ve tried so hard to make you happy here, Kinoe. I do everything I can. I let you grow your plants. I brought you your cat, and let you keep it inside with you. Is it not enough? Am I not enough for you, my child?”

“It’s not that-“ Kinoe choked. “Of course you’re enough, father...”

The man met their foreheads despite his son’s reluctance, smile breaking over his lips.

“Then trust me, Kinoe. I know what’s best for you. And right now, that is some chakra tea, some supper, and a great deal of rest. You’ve forced yourself into a flare up with all your fussing. Come now, get in bed. I will take care of dinner and your evening blood draw, since you aren’t feeling well.”

Watching the last embers of his hope sizzle away, stomped out into ash, Kinoe struggled to focus through the rush of reactions overwhelming his heart, and prioritize his answer.

“We still have to take blood tonight?”

His father nodded, lifting the nearly limp body before him and stepping through the long, twisted trail of hair to his son’s bedside.

“How am I supposed to find a cure for you if I can’t test any of my prototypes? Just blood tonight, no tissue or marrow. I’ll let you eat first to regain a little strength.”

Defeated, and hardly conscious, Kinoe simply answered in acceptance, thanking his father as well.

“You’re welcome, little flower,” he called gently from the doorway before crossing out and into the kitchen, leaving his son in a sweaty heap, silent tears to slip down the sides of his cheeks, alone.

Thirty minutes later, and dinner was served to the teen as he struggled to sit forward in bed. Fishcake was again swatted away by Kinoe’s father, this time forced from where he’d nestled against his master’s struggling heartbeat.

Kinoe ate slowly in the tense quiet, his father watching closely, yellow gaze bearing into him.

“Listen,” he started suddenly, as Kinoe finished his soup and shakily lifted a cup of tea to his lips. “That was the last of your chakra tea leaves. I’ll need to go to the village over and fetch more. It will take me a few days. I trust that you won’t try anything stupid in my absence. You remember what happened last time. You didn’t have your cat then. I’d hate to have to raise the stakes of your punishment if you did not learn your lesson before...”

Kinoe swallowed the bile rising up his throat, and whispered, “Yes sir... I understand.”

His father’s smile returned.

“Good. Finish your tea, and I’ll be back later take your blood sample. Perhaps while I’m out, I can pick up something as a more suitable birthday present.”

Kinoe offered a weak grunt of acceptance, trying to grin.

“Now, get some rest. Replenish yourself, little flower.”

His father left, and the teen forced down the rest of his tea, sleep taking him quickly after his father’s blood draw, body and spirit utterly drained.

Years of secret training, of hoping, of dreaming - all shot down in an instant. Perhaps his father was right.

Kinoe’s slumber carried him deep into his subconscious, his mind dumping him back into the tall, green glass of a human-sized test tube, naked, swallowed up by water and chemicals, bound by a tangle of wires, and his hair stretched out of the top and into a pile on the floor beside him.

He was thirteen. His father worked on a table in front of him, tinkering with a vial of blood as he pulled it from a centrifuge.

Then, in the blink of his eyes, he was ten. The blood vials and centrifuge we’re gone. Now, his father bent over a lifeless child, bound to an operating table, empty syringe in his hand, disappointment knitting his brow tight. In the distance, about a half a dozen human-sized test tubes could be seen, lit, bubbling, and occupied. Kinoe squinted through the eerie green glow, trying to clarify the image of what looked like a mess of shattered tubes with pale, bloated children slumped inside, eyes wide and long vacant, but, time shifted again. He was six now, surrounded by fifty or more test tubes, each one of them with a live, bound and floating child. Some were wide-eyed with terror, others beating against the glass with all their might, bubbles bursting out of their lungs in muted screams. Kinoe shut his eyes to the sight, squeezing them tighter and tighter, unable to disappear from the horror. He began to struggle against his own binds, thrash against the suffocating wet. A cry came through the disarray, muffled at first, becoming stronger, more definite as others joined in, forming a chorus in the dark. The wailing grew, and grew, deafening and desperate, engulfing Kinoe with it, drilling through his being until his soul became a scream, too. And then, a sudden burst of light, and with it’s blinding white, silence. Kinoe was just a toddler. His eyes adjusted. In front of him, coming into view, a young girl, almond-eyed and brown-hailed like him, smile beaming like sunlight over a freckled face.

“Tenzo?” She asked extending a hand forward. Kinoe returned the smile, reaching back. Their fingers brushed, and another hand slapped around the boy’s wrist, strong, cold, and white. The grasp yanked Kinoe backward, sinister laughter punctuated with a wheezing cough accompanying the terror of being whipped around and meeting the fatal pierce of yellow eyes.

Gasping awake, Kinoe shot forward in his bed, slick with sweat, chest heaving, and body shaking. He checked for reality - he was back in the tower, he was seventeen again, he was okay, he was - being stared at.

Mortified and pinching his thigh hard under his covers, Kinoe blinked rapidly, praying for his eyes to erase what had to be a trick of his terrified mind.

Across the room, perched on the rafters of the ceiling, a man, young, lanky, silver-haired, and masked, had one visible eye locked onto Kinoe, kunai poised for action in his hand.

Kinoe opened his mouth to scream for his father, immediately finding it stifled by the gloved palm of his intruder.

“Shh, it’s okay!” He promised in a frantic whisper. “I’m going to rescue you!”

A thousand thoughts rushed through Kinoe’s mind in an instant. His father had likely already left. He was alone. This man in his room, whoever he was had somehow found their hidden tower and made it though his father’s protective barriers and traps. Between the mask, kunai, and stealth, he was likely a shinobi. This was someone that had likely come to kill him, that could not be trusted - no matter that he said. This was everything his father had warned him about in the outside world, and it was happening in the safety of his tower, while he was alone. He was not strong enough for this.

Yet, he decided, he _had_ to be strong enough for it.

Snapping the jaws of his fear shut, Kinoe demanded control of his body.

He could do this.

Loosing his trained instinct, the teen wound his arm back and rammed an elbow into the intruder’s ribs, biting hard onto the fingers over his mouth, shouting through his teeth with a growl, “ _Like hell you are!_ ”

 


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! It took me quite a bit longer to get this chapter out than I originally anticipated, and I'm very sorry for that! Hopefully it is worth the wait for you!
> 
> Also, I wanted to note that both Kinoe and Kakashi might seem a little OOC here and there - and that is because they are - ha. I wanted to mix some Rapunzel and Eugene into each of them, respectively, for this piece. So, just a heads up there that their characterization is in fact quite intentional. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!

The intruder vanished in a burst of white smoke and a loud pop. A clone of some kind. Kinoe whipped his covers off, leaping out of bed, fists lifted to guard his face, cold sweat coating his skin. His eyes darted in search of his intruder’s real body, fearing he’d already escaped in the night, or was about to burst out, and draw a blade over his neck.

“Show yourself!”

Hands took a swift, firm grasp over his wrists, wrenching them behind his back. Kinoe writhed free, and turned to meet a pair of piercing, mismatched eyes from behind a porcelain dog mask. One shone of flint and steel, the other a beaming red fire.

Not a breath had passed through Kinoe’s lungs before his intruder began a ninjutsu combination. Though clearly experienced, and precisely executed, the blows that landed against Kinoe’s body fell softer than he’d braced for. Doubt dissolved from his mind when a kick darted upward in the last second, swiping over the top of the teen’s head and deviating from it’s original target, his neck - the nin was pulling his punches.

Brow furrowing and eyes narrowing, Kinoe went in for the counter-strike, nearly landing a hit to his intruder’s stomach, but instead swiping through the air as the man twisted away in a series of nimble flips to the other end of the room. The pair paused in a quick moment of mental strategy.

Kinoe demanded control over his mind, adrenaline flashing thought through his body like lightning.

“Calm down,” the intruder coaxed. “You can come quietly with me now, or wait here until I return. But, if you keep attacking, I will have to bring you down.”

Confident smirk taking his lips, Kinoe met his hands together, forming their unique seal.

“Who says you would be able to?”

The nin shifted his stance, eyes growing as he asked, “That sign - is that-"

“Mokuton: Daijurin no Jutsu!"

From the center of Kinoe’s palm burst a multitude of wooden branches, stretching fast and expanding wide to catch his stunned intruder. A blue tangle of lighting engulfed the nin’s hand, screaming loud as he leapt forward, carving in toward his opponent. Kinoe reached behind himself to grasp anything that might serve as some kind of a weapon, pleased and slightly amused at what his fingers found. His smile only spread further as splintered wood and sparks flew. How exhilarating it was, to fight back.

Just as the masked face of his intruder broke into view, Kinoe swung, hard as he could, the large frying pan he’d snatched up before. The shinobi’s eyes widened yet again, meeting with the mystery mokuton-user, a breath from his body and unable to dodge the impending blow. A loud clang echoed through the tower, followed by a thud, and the silver-headed nin lay crumpled and unconscious at Kinoe’s feet.

For a proud moment, time stopped and Kinoe squealed in victory, beaming down at Fishcake, who quickly slunk over to inspect the damage.

“Did you see that?! I caught a ninja! Me! Oh, wait until father sees! Well, I guess - I better really catch him before he wakes up.”

The teen scrambled, using his mokuton to form a chair beneath the intruder’s body, and binds around his wrists and ankles.

Smiling in satisfaction, Kinoe turned back to Fishcake, who then leapt up in the lap of their prisoner and pawed at the porcelain mask over his face.

“Fishcake, no. We can’t,” Kinoe protested, tone betraying his lack of conviction. “It’s not right to unmask a ninja.”

Fishcake simply blinked back at his master, orange tail giving a mischievous flick before swatting the mask to the ground.

To their surprise, another mask.

This one made of thin, athletic fabric and stretching up to from their intruder’s shirt to cover his neck, mouth and nose. Above it, the shinobi’s closed eyes looking younger, and far less menacing than before, save the long streak of a scar carving down from forehead, down over his left eyelid and dipping down under spandex covering.

Instinctively, Kinoe drew forward, hand outstretching for the fabric of the second mask. It couldn’t hurt, could it? After all, they’d already removed the first one.

His next step, neglectful in awed curiosity, met his foot over the discarded porcelain mask, cracking it, and stirring his prisoner awake. Both Kinoe and Fishcake retreated, quick as they could, and the mismatched eyes of their intruder fluttered open. He winced against what was sure to be a throbbing headache.

Rather than panicking, the man simply surveyed his surroundings, tugging lightly against his restraints.

He exhaled in defeat, clear agitation melting down his face.

“Alright, you caught me,” he announced to the room, having spotted the young mokuton-user hiding in the shadows, frying pan poised again over his head. “What now?”

The silver-head nin groaned again when no answer came, patience long gone.

“Listen, I know you’re freaked out, and that’s fair ‘cause I broke into your house and was watching you sleep. But, I didn’t come here to do that. I’m on a mission, and I didn’t expect to find princess long-hair asleep at the top of the tower.”

“I’m not a princess,” Kinoe snapped back from his hiding place, immediately regretting having taken the bait. He turned to Fishcake on his shoulder, looking for some kind of advice or indication for what to do next.

He had a man caught his mokuton - a ninja at that. What would his father say? Surely, this would be enough to prove his merit. But, then again, with his father being gone a few days with no way to reach him, who’s to say he could hold the intruder this long. Kinoe had been lucky to catch him, the element of surprise being the true victor. Not to mention that the man hadn’t seemed like he’d been looking to fight in the first place. Still, he couldn’t be trusted.

“Right, right,” the nin conceded, rolling his eyes. “Prince.”

Kinoe scowled, having had enough and stepping out into the light.

“I’m not a prince either! You have some gall - mocking me while you’re the one caught in my bounds.”

The man’s eye flicked over into Kinoe’s, a bit of a terrifying edge through his tone as he asked, “Am I?”

Kinoe swallowed, claiming authority of himself and pointing his frying pan in the man’s face.

“Who are you? Why did you break in here?”

Snorting, the nin simply asked in rebuttal, “Who are _you_ and why do you _live_ here?”

Kinoe threateningly shoved his frying pan forward and insisted with a scowl, “I asked my question first.”

“Okay, well,” the nin continued, arrogance and irritation growing thick through his response. “I’m not going to answer any of your questions.”

Kinoe’s eyes narrowed as he lowered his frying pan and squared his shoulders.

“Fine.”

His intruder smirked beneath his mask as the wooden binds on his wrists and ankles tightened.

“Ah, so that’s how you want to play? Not what I would have expected from the man wielding cookware.”

As the binds constricted further, and the nin’s grin flinched at the corner, teeth grinding in pain.

“You’re willing to let both wrists and ankles break?” Kinoe queried.

Mouth breaking open with a slight hissed inhale, the prisoner growled, “Try me, princess.”

Releasing the breath he’d been holding, Kinoe relented, whispering through pants, with the shake of his head, “No, I’m not going to stoop to a level as low as yours...”

The man exhaled in relief, flexing and curling his fingers.

“Listen, I promise you, I’m one of the good guys. I don’t know what life has looked like for you here, as a prisoner, or henchman, or whatever you are - but I am going to get you out of this place and get you help.”

Kinoe blinked, not quite knowing how to respond.

“If-if you were assigned on a mission out here, then you obviously knew someone lived out here. Were you not looking for me?”

“Where I am quite curious about you now, no, I wasn’t.”

The two held each other’s eyes for a moment, both caught behind words they worried might be too revealing.

“Then...” Kinoe started, deciding to brave onward, assuming the knowledge would come out eventually. “You were looking for my father.”

The nin gaped.

“Your _father_? Lord Orochimaru is your father?”

He shook his head, eyes closing as he muttered bitterly, “Oh, I’m so sorry... I’d hoped this wouldn’t be the case...”

Kinoe stood in an awkward loss, wishing he’d stayed hidden and waited for the return of his father before proceeding.

The nin sighed, opening his eyes again to look up at his captor.

“What’s your name?”

Kinoe looked to Fishcake, shifting on his feet.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” the silver-haired man promised.

“Kinoe.”

“Kinoe,” the man repeated, suddenly very somber, all sass and frustration dimmed into his dark tone. “I’ve been tracking the Lord Orochimaru for several years now, and I need you to understand, he is not your father.”

Taken aback, Kinoe nearly laughed, shaking his head in denial.

“You lie! You don’t even know my father!”

“I’ve encountered him several times now, briefly. But, enough for me to know my target, and likely for him to recognize me. He’s around five-eight, one-forty pounds. Albino-skinned, with straight black hair that extends past his shoulders. Over his yellow eyes and dipping towards his nose are purple markings, although I’m not sure if they are part of his skin, or painted on. He also bears a pair of fangs, and speaks rather low, and croaky. And, most all his trademark jutsu include snakes of some kind.”

Kinoe’s mouth ran dry.

“Am I wrong?”

“You-You’re just trying to play with my head! You’re a ninja; you murder and sneak through the night! You can’t be trusted! Tell me why you’ve been following my father!”

Kinoe raised his frying pan overhead, cheeks growing hot, eyelids brimming with tears.

“Stay calm, Kinoe.” The intruder instructed firmly. “I have nothing to gain from lying to you. I want to help.”

“Just shut up!”

Kinoe swung hard, and knocked the nin unconscious a second time. His chest heaved in the quiet, and the frying pan clattered to the floor from his absent grasp. Fishcake nuzzled his forehead against his master’s shin, mewing softly. The interaction had Kinoe leap out of his skin, and nearly swatting away his beloved companion. Struck with guilt, he melted down over the orange tabby, crumpling onto apologies and tears.

“Fishcake... what did I get us into...”

The pair stayed there on the floor a moment as hysteria and adrenaline drained out of Kinoe’s veins through a few more exhausted sobs.  
Fishcake pressed his paw into his master’s belly, and the teen nodded.

“You’re right. We should take a beat, refuel... won’t be able to keep him in captivity without any strength.”

Standing, Kinoe gave orders for Fishcake to keep watch over their slumbering prisoner, which the feline executed proudly while curled up inside the discarded frying pan, orange fluffy chub spilling over the sides, eyes glinting and tail flicking in readiness.

Kinoe made his way into the kitchen, and began idly staring into the pantry, lost in thought.

He still didn’t know who this man was or what he wanted. Why did he know what his father looked like? Why did he claim he wasn’t actually Kinoe’s father? What was Kinoe to do now while he waited for the man to wake. He knew he couldn’t dispose of the nin, despite how the idea appealed to him. But, he also knew he couldn’t allow himself to get caught up in the ninja’s deceit again. He had to keep composure, remain in control.

He could do this. He would show his father he could do this.

Still, through the fear and confusion, a small part of the teen’s heart reeled with an elated thrill to talk to, and be in the presence of another human. Even stronger than the need to prove himself by holding the nin captive, silent desire lit within him to not let this man vanish and leave him alone again.

The shinobi stirred with a groan, head rolling downward as pain greeted him awake. Turning from the pantry, arms full and straightening his posture with false confidence, Kinoe announced, “I see you’re awake again. I’m making breakfast for Fishcake and myself. I will bring you some water and a small portion when we’re through. I have no interest in any more of your lies or games. So you might as well get comfortable and quiet.”

“You named your cat Fishcake?”

Kinoe stayed focused on the boiling of water before him, answering in tight tone, “I told you to be quiet. I have no qualms knocking you out until the message gets through your thick head.”

The nin raised his hands in surrender as best he could against the binds, yielding, “Alright, alright. I’ll be quiet. Just, one thing please?”

For a moment, the shinobi let a sliver of vulnerability break through the cracks of his haughty exterior as he earnestly asked, “Will you let me pull my hitai-ate over my eye?”

Kinoe glanced over his shoulder, brow knitting together.

“It uses a considerable amount of chakra, and since I’m apparently going to be here a while, I’d like to rest it.”

It seemed like a harmless enough request, Kinoe thought, chewing his lip as he divided food between three bowls.

“Alright,” He conceded, bending down to set a bowl before Fishcake, and crossing over with the other two. “But I’m going to do it. I’ll get your mask too.”

The shinobi’s eyes popped.

“Don’t!”

Kinoe shot down an quizzical glare.

“How are you supposed to eat with your mask up?”

“I have a jutsu that allows me to look like I have it up when I don’t. If you’d release my hands a tiny bit so I could weave the signs-"

“Oh, come _on_!” Kinoe interrupted. “How naive do you think I am?”

The nin flinched back as his captor’s hand reached forward.

“Look, you have to trust me here,” he pleaded.

A loud, short laugh burst out of Kinoe.

“No I don’t! You broke into my tower and are stalking my father, likely to kill him. Also, you’re trying to convince me that he’s not even my father, and take me-”

“Hatake Kakashi.”

Kinoe froze, blinking a few times with a short shake of his head.

“What?”

“My name,” the nin explained. “I told you I’d tell you mine if you told me yours. My name is Hatake Kakashi. I’m a Jonin shinobi of Konoha, and a Captain of an elite special operations team.”

Keeping their gaze locked, Kinoe ever-so-slightly extended the reach of his prisoner’s hands in order to tug down his hitai-ate and meet to form his signs.

Immediately, the intruder placed his wrists back down, waiting for the slack to tighten away.

“Thank you.” He whispered with a small nod of gratitude.

Kinoe, having left the binds long enough for the man to feed himself, but tight enough to keep him from weaving and more signs, sat on the floor, a bit torn within himself about whether or not he should have allowed that.

“You’re welcome, Kakashi.”

The nin smiled under mask cover, or rather, under jutsu cover, and went then out on a bit of a limb, “What’s say we’re able to keep trading answers? We can take turns asking a question of the other. We can decide to pass on a question, but it also means we pass on our following turn to ask a question.”

Kakashi took a disguised bite as his captor mentally wrestled with himself.

“I don’t have any information to share with you.”

“Ah, but you do have information you’d like me to share with you,” Kakashi noted with a swing of his spoon through the air. “Right?”

The teen shared a quick glance with Fishcake, who seemed to offer a shrug the best the feline could.

“Okay. I’ll accept these terms.”

“Good,” Kakashi grinned, mouth full. “Tell me where you learned to cook like this?”

Slowly, Kinoe raised his own spoonful up for a bite, not really believing that this was the first question a shinobi in his captivity would ask.

“Books,” the he answered, short and curt.

“You’re quite skilled.” Kakashi carried on, taking in another spoonful. “Thank you for sharing with me. You didn’t have to do that.”

The phrase “you’re welcome,” fought it’s way up Kinoe’s throat, but his teeth ground against their escape. He’d already offered this intruder food, allowed him to perform a jutsu, and got the pair of them in conversation. He couldn’t allow anything further niceties. He could not trust this man.

Instead, Kinoe took his turn asking a question.

“Are you going to try and kill my father?”

Kakashi gave a slight, low hum of amusement.

“Pass.”

Kinoe tried again to force airs as cool and confident as his prisoner.

“Why is one of your eyes red?”

“Pass.”

“What’s the deal with keeping your mask up?”

“Pass.”

“Come on! _Really_?” Kinoe roared, exasperated. Chewing on his lips again, he surrendered into a question held simply for anyone to care about. “Have you ever seen the release of the floating lanterns?”

Cocking his head, Kakashi answered, “The yearly thing, at the end of the memorial festival? Yes, I have. I go every year I can.”

Kinoe opened his mouth instinctively to ask what it was like to see up close, but was quickly interrupted by the loss of his turn.

“Alright, I suppose it’s time I finally address the seventy-foot, silky, brown elephant in the room. Why is your hair so long?”

“Um, I-uh,” Kinoe stuttered, frantically filing through excuses for one that might fit convincingly enough. “I-I don’t know. It just has always been extremely long, and continued to grow like this through the years…”

Silence fell between them, Kakashi’s blank, unimpressed stare bearing down onto the teen.

“Wow. You are a terrible liar, Kinoe.”

“I’m not lying,” the brunette shot back, blush lighting his cheeks.

“Suuure...” the nin nodded, voice labored under the weight of his sarcasm. “I’m really convinced now.”

Before Kinoe could protest further, Kakashi waved him off, and let the blatant lie slide by.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. Just ask your next question.”

Embarrassment still flustering him, Kinoe allowed the first thought he had to come up and out of his mouth, having completely lost all sense of who he was aiming to interrogate.

“What’s it like, living the the village?”

“Oh, um...” Kakashi’s visible eye widened. “It’s noisy. Lively. But also, there’s a calmness to it, sort of a peace in the mess of it all, I guess. I don’t know if that answers your question at all...”

He shifted in his seat, empty bowl in his lap giving a jingle as his spoon slid around the rim.

“How long have you been in this tower?” he asked gently after a beat.

“As long as I can remember.” Kinoe stated matter-of-factly with a shrug of his shoulders.

“No,” Kakashi corrected, a slow precision to his next clarification, as if he were suddenly afraid not to tread lightly though his captor’s feelings. “I don’t mean ‘how long have you lived here.’ I mean, when was the last time you left the tower?”

The light flickered out of Kinoe’s eyes.

“Pass…” he whispered in defeat.

The two let the silent linger a moment in the weight implications.

“I see…” Kakashi murmured. “Why can’t you leave?”  
  
“Father doesn’t allow it,” Kinoe confessed. “It’s not safe.”

“Don’t you want to leave?

The teen stared at his hands.  
“It’s not your turn anymore…”

Fishcake leapt into his master’s open palms, nuzzling his forehead against Kinoe’s chest.

Giving a slight clearing of his throat, Kinoe continued with his turn.

“What made you become a shinobi?”

Kakashi hesitated a moment, shifting again in the seat of his chair before answering.

“I did, I guess. My own convictions.”

He took a beat, his own eyes becoming rather distant. “Along the way, there have been a lot of people to reinforce those convictions.”

“Convictions to slaughter for government pay?” Kinoe accused, venom laced through the bite.

Kakashi met his captor’s glare, absorbing it and shooting it back ten-fold from his one exposed eye.

“Convictions to serve and protect my village and comrades.”

Eventually, Kinoe broke the stare, confusion twisting nauseous knots through his stomach. He stood, collecting his and Fishcake’s bowls, and then snatching his prisoner’s before crossing to the kitchen sink, bare feet striking an angry, thudding march over the floor.

None of this made any sense.

“Your mokuton...” He heard from over his shoulder.

“Did Lord Orochimaru give you those abilities?”

Through he did not turn, Kinoe’s hands stilled under the rush of the faucet.

“What do you mean, ‘give me my mokuton?’ How would he even do that?” He spat back, whipping around when the shinobi fell silent.

“What do you think your father does?” Kakashi asked, voice filled with a pity that made Kinoe’s blood boil.

“He’s just my father...” the teen answered, heat flushing over his skin again. “He goes into the village during the day to work. He comes home at night. He cares for me, keeps me safe and well… What do _you_ think my father does?”

Kakashi’s mouth opened beneath his mask, and after a strained moment, an exhale brought his shaking head to hang.

Reopening his eye, and looking back to his captor, the nin spoke as earnestly as he could.

“Listen, Kinoe, I don’t want to play a game with your life. There’s a lot that you apparently don’t know…”

“Like _what_?” Kinoe demanded, patience lost and body trembling. “That you think my father isn’t my father? That you think he deserves to die?”

“I don’t know about dealing out judgement like that. I do believe, however, that he does need to be stopped,” Kakashi replied, calm and controlled.

“And why is that?” Kinoe shouted indignantly, prowling toward his prisoner with every assumption that followed. “Because he lives outside the village in secrecy? Because the price on his head was high enough?”

“Because he is the most notorious, vile, and diabolical outlaw of our time,” Kakashi bellowed back, rendering the young man in front of him dumb-struck. “He deserted the village, tried to murder his own teammates, has enslaved and slaughtered clans, and kidnapped over a hundred children from their homes for his own vile, tortuous human experiments. For more than half a century he has terrorized Konoha and villages alike, evading capture and defeat at the cost of too many lost lives.”

“That’s preposterous!” Kinoe refuted with a furious shake of his head. “My father’s not even in his forties - how could he have done this for nearly a century? I don’t care what you think he’s done! He is _my father_!”

“He is not!”

“You think he kidnapped me? You think he stole me away from my clan?”

Kinoe, red-faced and fuming, gripped tight around the short vine binds around his the nin’s wrists, slamming his hands into the armrests of his chair, and bore in a breath away from his prisoner. “My clan was slaughtered by shinobi scum like you! My father rescued me - we were the only ones that got out alive!”

Kakashi's mouth fell open, mind racing, and a revelation slipping out in a barely audible hush.

“The Ibura clan…”

Kinoe released his grip, straightening up tall and continuing, “I should have never spoken to you. Shinobi scum. That’s fine - you can just stay here in my clutches until my father returns. Then he can take care of you - deal with your lying mouth.”

“I have no intention of waiting like a sitting duck,” Kakashi revealed with a sudden snap back into his lofty, cocky swagger. “My mission was to confirm Lord Ororchimaru’s hideout, and I have. I am going to report to my superiors. You can either come with me back to the village, or you can wait here for whoever is dispatched after me.”

Kinoe have a sharp, sarcastic laugh.

“That’s a nice proposal, however, I’m afraid you’ve forgotten that I’m the one that has you captured.”

The nin drew in a slow breath, visible eye closing, static rising through tense air. Kinoe’s skin prickled with goose-bumps, panic directing the erratic rush of his heart.

Kakashi released his breath, and with it, the electric crackle of blue lighting flashing around his body. He stood effortlessly as the binds and chair beneath him shattered to the floor in a pile of sizzling splinters.

Kinoe’s mouth fell open as terror, embarrassment, and awe left him pale-faced and unblinking.

“Kinoe,” Kakashi started. “I am very sorry for the circumstances that have brought you here. I know you don’t believe me, but I want to help, and that means completing my mission and stopping Lord Ororchimaru once and for all.”

A stuttered swallow forced dry air down Kinoe’s parched throat.

He was going to leave. He was going to come back with more shinobi. He was going to have Kinoe’s father killed.

“I can’t let you do that.”

Kakashi darted his eye over the shift in his captor’s stance.

“Stand down, Kinoe. I don’t want to fight you,” he warned, fruitlessly.

With a shout, Kinoe recklessly charged in, attempting to catch the nin again within his mokuton. But, Kakashi, no longer holding back, slipped through each twist of wood, untouchable. The pair in close quarters began to trade blows, Kinoe abandoning his jutsu, and his opponent drawing a kunai.

As informally trained, and inexperienced as he was, Kinoe held is own fairly well, even landing a foot against the shinobi’s side before the man revealed his red eye a second time. It was over in an instant then, Kakashi bringing the teen to his knees, arms pinned behind his back, blade against his throat.

“I’m sorry… hopefully, someday you’ll understand and can thank me for this.”

Kakashi’s kunai fell loose from his grasp, clattering to the floor at Kinoe’s knees.

“I won’t!” the teen cried, hot tears threatening to break over the sides of his eyelids.

“I don’t care what you think he’s done! He’s my father!” He repeated, whipping around to watch the shinobi leave, voice breaking with frantic desperation.

“How can you say you’re the good guy if you’d really do it? If you’d take a father away from his son?”

Kakashi froze.

“You’d make me an orphan, Kakashi?”

The shinobi’s shoulders fell heavy, gloved hands flexing into tight fists at his waist. Only Kinoe’s panted breathing filled the tower.

And then -

“Let me prove it to you.”

“What?”

Kakashi’s face turned to glance slightly behind him, flint gaze shining and looking almost tortured as he proposed, “Come with me now, and I will hold off on making my report. I can show you the man your father _really_ is. I can show you where you came from… I can prove to you that my actions are warranted. After, I will let you decide what you want to do, and I will give you a chance to make the call with me...”

Kinoe’s fingers found their way around the discarded kunai, and a hardness found its way into his voice as he declared, “I’ll never agree to let you kill my father.”

“I’m trying to give you a choice here, Kinoe,” Kakashi sighed. “I’m trying to open your eyes a little bit to what’s outside the walls.”

“We’d leave the tower?”

The nin finally turned, crossing back to the torn young man he’d stumbled upon atop the tower, flexing and unflexing his hand as the urge to offer it stirred awake through his chest.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he assured with a nod. “You have my word. No report on Lord Orochimaru until after you’ve seen what I have to show you.”

Kinoe’s heart thundered. The chance to leave, to go beyond the walls, to see the village, to breathe fresh air - finally here in front of him. But then, coming from a ninja, a man out to damn his father, a man of lethal ability and unknown true intention. The risk still remained. Surely his father would find out. Surely he would pay dearly.

Kinoe blinked away his tears, sniffing hard and straightening up.

He could not do this. It was not safe. He was not strong enough. He should stay in the tower. He should wait for his father. His father would know what to do. His father would fix it.

Slowly, a gloved hand uncurled in front of Kinoe’s face, Kakashi kneeling down to offer it with the softest of whispers, “Come on, princess. You’ve got to trust me a little.”

Kinoe’s hand filled Kakashi’s, and from somewhere deep inside himself, courage burst forth.

“Okay, he resolved finally, the pair of them pulling up to their feet. “But, my cat comes with us.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Alright,” Kakashi called as he hopped off the last of the tower’s mossy stones and onto the ground, squinting back up at the young man hovering over his window seal, arms full of brown tresses. “Let down your hair.”

Kinoe swallowed hard, his entire body trembling, misted with anxious sweat. Not an hour went by that he hadn’t dreamed of leaving the tower, and yet, standing on the edge of it all, the teen found himself utterly immobilized.

“Come on, Kinoe. We can’t really be wasting time here.”

Willing his body to move, Kinoe found himself instinctually taking a step backward, nearly tumbling over Fishcake, who’d slipped under his feet.

“Ah, I’m sorry...”

The feline mewed loudly, nudging his head against his master’s calves, and then leaping up onto his shoulder.

“Right. Yes. We can do this,” Kinoe declared, moving back to the edge, hoisting his hair up and tossing it out to catch on the large hook dangling between him and freedom. “Thank you, Fishcake. Yes. We can do this...”

“Kino- _ah!”_

Kinoe chucked to himself, greatly amused that the shinobi’s prodding had been shut up, courtesy of the massive length of hair that had thundered down from above.

“Okay, here we go.”

Fishcake found himself scooped down into his master’s open arm, as the grasp of his other wrapped around thick brown.

Drawing a final breath, and briefly closing his eyes, Kinoe leapt, cascading down into the free air, rippling brunette waves whipping above him as he soared, like a bird through the open. He clenched his fist tight in the final moment before reaching the ground, bringing a harsh halt to his descent. Then, the brunette extended a single, bare toe, slowly reaching it to touch down against fluffy grass and damp earth.

All the years, all the hoping, and planning, and dreaming, and aching, and he was there. He was free.

Both feet met with the dirt, and Kinoe found himself immediately melting to his knees, stretching his hands through green growth, an unstoppable, beaming, brilliant joy overtaking his being.

Fishcake mewed lightly and happily, prancing forward a bit, and looking over his shoulder as if to call his master further out into the glorious unbound world.

Kinoe, scrambling to stand again, lunging forward with child-like abandon, laugher spilling out of him, ecstatically obliged.

The pair sprang through the open field around them, chasing butterflies as they burst out of flowers in their wake. Head spinning, Kinoe lost himself in the color, in the rich, sweet, crisp freshness of morning air and the warm, wondrous wash of sunlight spilling over his whole body at once. He charged thoughtlessly into the frigid splash of a near-by stream as soon as his eyes caught the sight. Part of him longed to lose his clothes in the excitement, to strip down to his skin and soak in every sensation to its fullest.

That part of him nearly won over his actions, until the other, more self-aware parts of him finally caught up to his consciousness and reminded the teen that he shared company with more than just Fishcake and the butterflies.

“I take it, you’re enjoying yourself?” Kakashi asked, smile curled up neatly under black spandex, the sun casting a shimmer through his silver hair as Kinoe turned back to re-acknowledge the reason he’d in fact left the tower.

“Don’t mock me... you have no idea what this means to me...”

“Oh, no,” the shinobi answered, shifting his weight as his eye darted a bit. “I’m not mocking you at all. I can’t imagine...”

Kinoe’s smile returned, somehow a bit fuller than before, and his own eyes found themselves darting away as well.

His chest heaved in the pause, and his adrenaline began to settle. Then, turning to look back at the great, looming height of his tower, the sharp agony of terror and guilt twisted through his gut, robbing his breath and dimming the sunshine.

“I-this..” he stuttered, frantically clinging to his carefree joy as it slipped away from him, yanked, kicking and screaming, by the heels into the dark depths of anxiety. “This was a mistake.”

His father was going to find out. There was no way around it. Kinoe has left the tower, and not only that, but had left with a ninja - willingly.

“What-what am I doing? I can’t leave the tower. I left the tower... Father’s going to... Father...”

Kinoe’s world blurred into chaos, a nauseous swirl of his father’s threats, punishments, and warnings of the outside world, and with them, the suffocating guilt of disobedience.

“Hey, Kinoe, uh...” Kakashi started, obvious discomfort through his voice. “It’s alright. I know this has to be a lot, but...”

As the nin trailed off, one of the butterflies filling the field floated its way over onto the back of Kinoe’s thumb.

Breathless, the teen lifted his hand to bring vibrant yellow wings into view, the loveliness of it moving a gentle wind through the torrent of his soul.

He swallowed, large almond eyes blinking slow as he offered from his other hand, a growing blossom of his own creation, simple white petals inviting the insect inward.

“Beautiful...”

Kinoe’s haze flicked back over Kakashi, who was looking rather awe-struck himself, his mouth still open behind the whisper that’d escaped.

“I, um, listen,” he stammered, clearing his throat. “We need to keep moving. You can still go back up and wait in the tower for Lord Orochimaru if you’ve changed your mind. I’m not going to force you. But, if you’d still like to-"

“No,” Kinoe interrupted, the butterfly floating away, up and into the blue. “I’m going.”

Kakashi nodded, pleased, and then began to form a few hand signs before slamming an open palm onto the earth and shouting, “Kuchiyose no Jutsu!“

In an immediate puff of white, a cluster of dogs appeared, varying in size and breed, all adorned with collars, a unique clothing item of some kind, and a hitai-ate of their own.

Fishcake’s hair stood on end as his back arched at the sight. One glance from the dogs, and the cat leapt up onto his master’s shoulder, offering a threatening hiss.

“You work with dogs...” Kinoe observed curiously. “Ninja dogs...”

“Hey, Kakashi, who’s the kid?” The smallest dog suddenly asked, speaking as plainly and casually any human.

Kinoe’s mouth fell open and Fishcake buried himself deep under his master’s hair.

“Your dogs _talk?!”_

Kakashi raised an eyebrow, quipping back, “Your father’s snakes don’t?”

He shook his head, correcting himself, “I guess only the big one does, and I suppose you haven’t seen that one... These are my ninken. They’re ninja in their own right, same as me. And they’re going to ensure our safe travel.”

Kakashi turned back to the small pack of dogs, kneeling to better address them.

“That is Kinoe. I found him up in the hideout. Thinks he’s Lord Orochimaru’s son... I’m going to take him for a while to let him see his supposed father’s true colors. I need you to set up a parameter, a wide one, so that Lord Orochimaru doesn’t come back without our knowing about it. Understood?”

The dog scowled, asking incredulously, “You’re not making a report first?”

“My report will come after. I need to take care of this first.”

“Kakashi…” the dog appealed warningly.

“Pakkun...” the nin countered. “Do I look worse than scum to you?”

The hound huffed.

“No.”

Confused, Kinoe cocked his head and shared a glance with Fishcake, who’d finally poked his head out of hiding.

“Good,” Kakashi exacted, standing back to his feet. “I’m going to keep it that way. So, could you please make a parameter for us?”

Scratching roughly behind his ear, the sour little pug agreed, “Fine. But you owe us all a bone, and not that artificial, manufactured crap. The good stuff.”

“You have my word,” the nin promised, winking his visible eye, and looking back to Kinoe. “Are you ready?”

Nodding slow, Kinoe gave a last look up his tower, realizing just how enormous a shadow of cast against the sun.

“Well,” Kakashi concluded, gingerly plucking the daisy from Kinoe’s hand and inhaling deep before tucking it between crooked hitai-ate and silver hair, and crossing in front of the teen. “Come along then. We’ve a ways to go.”

Kinoe’s eyes followed the nin, tearing away from his tower, and refusing to look back as he set his steps after Kakashi, brown train of hair trailing behind him and through the confused and judgmental gaze of the shinobi’s ninken.

The two carried on in silence for an hour or so, through the lush winding woodland. Overwhelmed and overstimulated by the the new world he found himself in, Kinoe simply marveled at all he’d only once imagined. There were not words enough for the awe of brought him to watch squirrels skitter from tree to tree, to feel the warmth of rolling light shafts over his skin as they broke through leafy tree cover, to walk the paths he’d only trod though in his mind.

It was beauty incomparable. It was being truly alive.

Every so often, the ever-present fear for what could possibly come for his father, or what punishment would certainly come from his father would resurface, shooting distress through the teen’s spine. Staring at the back of Kakashi’s tornado of silver, spiky hair didn’t do much for adding any soothing feelings to Kinoe’s nerves either.

Sure, he’d followed him, but where were they actually going? What were his motives really? And while he was questioning things, what really were his own motives? Was he truly just looking to buy time for the sake of his father? Was he just looking for a way out of the tower at long last? Was there a part of him that was genuinely curious to find out whether or not this mysterious shinobi may actually be telling the truth about his origin and the man Kinoe called “father?”

“Hey Kinoe,” Kakashi called suddenly, derailing the brunette’s train of thought. “Let me know if you’re getting hungry at all. I have some food pills that we can share until we make camp tonight.”

Kinoe’s expression twisted.

“Food pills?” He ventured curiously before getting to his real concern. “Wait, we have to make camp for the night? Can’t we stay somewhere in the village?

“We have to make camp, because we’ll still have several hours in the morning to travel before we even reach the village.”

Kinoe stopped in his tracks, face contorting as he demanded an explanation.

“That doesn’t make any sense. My father goes in to the village every morning to work. Sure, it takes him while, and he has to leave early, but he goes there and back every day.”

At this confession, Kakashi stopped too, lips pursing under his mask.

“It takes a solid day to get to the village from your tower, a day and a half they pace we’re traveling,” Kakashi stated matter-of-factly, visible eye studying Kinoe’s fallen gaze. “Maybe he has some kind of jutsu or something to speed up his travel. But, we will have to make camp for ourselves. You said he was going to be gone a few days, right?”

Kinoe nodded, Kakashi then giving his shoulder a light shove and then digging into one of his back belt satchels. The nin pulled out and offered in his palm a handful of small, black, medicinal-looking balls.

“Here.”

Fishcake leapt up on his master’s shoulder, leaning inward to catch a better whiff of the strange food item. Upon his inspection however, the feline gave a disgusted retch and turned his nose up.

“Nobody asked you,” Kakashi cracked back, rolling his eye and readdressing Kinoe. “These are food pills. They’re kind of a staple for shinobi. Each one is packed with all kinds of vitamins and nutrients. Think, extremely-concentrated super-food.”

Kinoe took one in hand, turning it over and giving his own sniff. It did smell rather rancid, like the inside of a humid barn.

“This allows us to fuel on the go, and helps us travel light.”

Nibbling a tiny bite, Kinoe instantly regretting having done so. He forced himself to swallow.

“You eat these regularly?” he asked, cheeks knotted between his teeth. _“How?”_

“Hey, they’re not _that_ bad,” the nin defended, turning his back and restarting their trek. “I actually made these myself.”

“Well,” Kinoe continued, plugging his nose before popping in the rest of the pill. “You are definitely letting me cook for us tonight.”

An amused hum drifted back from Kakashi, Kinoe fruitlessly craning his neck to try and peek as he saw the shinobi peel his mask away just a moment to drop in his own ration.

“You’ll have no complaints from me there.”

Dusk came soon after, Kinoe losing himself again in both the mental valleys and mountains of being outside his tower, Fishcake trotting faithfully along his side, and their escort silently guiding the way.

Intentional to pick a spot with a view of the sunset, while still being hidden well enough away from peering eyes, Kakashi began to set up camp, although there wasn’t much to show for it.

At the sight of a well-crafted, but bare-bones lean-to, Kinoe glanced expectantly over to the nin.

“What?” Kakashi remarked with a shrug of his shoulders. “I normally just make do in trees.”

Kinoe sighed, shaking his head and then crashing his palms together with the pursing of his lips and a spark through his eyes. Perhaps trees could still be the answer.

Bursting forth from the earth and forming itself up and over the teen, sprang a series of wooden arches in the shape of a protective dome.

He turned to Kakashi, a slight sweat on his brow, and a pride through his grin.

“I learned it for defense, but, I figure it could serve as a shelter for the night.”

Impressed, Kakashi nodded, stumbling, “Yah, yes. That-this is excellent. Thank you.”

Flushing slightly, Kinoe looked to his feet.

“I’ll, uh, go refill the canteens and see about catching some fish. You should rest. Pull the rest of your hair to catch up with us or something.”

Kakashi nearly tripped over Fishcake at his feet as he left, traveling just a stone’s throw away and kneeling beside the small stream that ran beside them.

Before taking care of anything else, the shinobi allowed his mask to fall, his back to both sets of prying eyes, and scooped down a drink, splashing his bare face after and shaking his silver mane.

Kinoe simply stared, and were it not for the flick of Fishcake’s tail over his shins, and the sly look shot up to him from the feline, he probably wouldn’t have realized that his mouth had fallen open too.

“Shut up...” he grumbled, turning away and beginning to nest inside his dome covering. In the brief moments he’d had before leaving the tower, Kinoe had managed to stuff a few items in a satchel, one of them being a modest blanket. He warred with whether it would be best to lay under or over the blanket when Kakashi returned, dripping fish in one hand, outstretched canteen in the other.

Holding true to his promise, Kinoe prepared their dinner, prepping the fillets with a few hand-grown herbs, and a bit of salt he’d happened to throw in his satchel, and then having the shinobi surprise him again, by cooking with a small, controlled fireball jutsu, when informed that an actual fire was out of the question for maintaining their safe travel.

“Whoa,” Kinoe whispered, watching the last of the flames die away from Kakashi’s breath, seared fish sizzling and juicy between them. “How many chakra natures to you have? Fire and lightning?”

The nin looked away sheepishly, his arrogance suddenly lost.

“And water... and earth...”

“That’s four out of the five!” Kinoe exclaimed. “I wish I had fire or lightning...”

“You’re kidding right?” Kakashi retorted, flat and in complete disbelief. “You have wood-style.”

Handing a skewed fish fillet over to the nin, and then serving some of the chopped bits to Fishcake, who’d been practically drooling at his master’s side,

Kinoe regurgitated his father’s words, “They’re just garden tricks...”

“Kinoe...” the silver-haired shinobi started, trailing off and then shaking his head. “I really need to get you back to your clan...”

Kinoe swallowed his bite, snapping back, “My clan is _dead.”_

“I know that... But, you need to understand why your jutsu is so important. You know it’s a kekkei genkai, right?”

Kinoe took another bite, his stomach demanding more despite their conversation.

“I’ve read a little about kekkei genkai, yes.”

“Then you know how rare it is.”

Setting aside his cleaned skewer, Kinoe chewed the inside of his cheek, murmuring softly, “Just because something is rare doesn’t mean it’s useful.”

Kakashi leaned in slightly, the pierce of his visible eye intensifying. “It does in this case. Very useful.”

He sat back, pausing in the chorus of croaking frogs and chirping crickets, gaze losing itself in dark, distant memory. “Needed to prevent a lot of tragedy...”

Kinoe didn’t know whether to speak, or even if he could.

Surely this man could not be a shinobi.

“You should sleep.” He spoke suddenly, handing his fish skewer down to Kinoe as he stood and crossed away. “We’ll need to rise early.”

Kinoe took a beat to process the change and in dialogue, as well as the fish in his hand as the nin pulled out another small handful of food pills for himself.

“I can take first watch,” the teen suggested.

“No, don’t worry about watches.” Kakashi turned and offered a reassuring grin. “I’ll look after you tonight.”

“You aren’t going to sleep?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Frowning, Kinoe objected, “That’s stupid. I can watch us for a few hours.”

He bit a hunk out of the gifted fish fillet and carried on.

“Besides, won’t your elite, special-operations-ninja-training-whatever cause you to wake up if you even _smell_ danger in your sleep anyway?”

Kakashi stared back flatly, reply full of sass, “It _would_.”

He rolled his food pills between gloved palms and exposed fingers.

“Still, I will watch us tonight. Finish eating, then sleep.”

No longer wishing to argue, Kinoe sighed, shrugging at Fishcake and offering his companion the last bit of his dinner. In the noisy quiet of the forest at night, stream babbling on, creatures chattering about, the teen found a bit of peace and ease. How lovely it was, to see the stars spread open over the whole sky, to be immersed in a world he’d only known from a window. Fishcake quickly nuzzled himself between arm and chest as soon as his master had laid their blanket down.

Sleep however, evaded them.

Kinoe turned to look upon Kakashi a moment, his back turned to them, black silhouette outlined by the flickering glow of fireflies here and there, nose buried in a small paperback book of some sort.

“Kakashi…”

The young man hummed in response.

“Earlier today, When you were talking to your ninken,” Kinoe started, caution and curiosity threaded through his gentle petition. “You asked them if they thought you looked worse than scum… What did that mean? Were you referencing when I called you shinobi scum?”

Kakashi stilled, a certain unease weighing over his shoulders, and pulling his response rigid.

“I did think it was a bit of a sick coincidence that you used that specifc phrasing, but no, I wasn’t referencing it.”

Looking to Fishcake a moment and rubbing sweet, massaging fingers through the feline’s orange fur, Kinoe pressed a little deeper.

“Then, what?”

Kakashi turned the page of his book, though he was no longer looking at the pages, mouth opening behind his mask with no words to flow forward in explanation. Even through the dark, Kinoe could see from the look in the shinobi’s visible eye, that his question had breached tender, haunted, forbidden territory for Kakashi. His own mouth opening to apologize for this intrusion, Kinoe found himself surprisingly interrupted.

“I had an old teammate, a friend, that told me once, ‘Those that break the rules and regulations are scum. But those who abandon their friends are even worse than scum.’”

Kinoe exhaled softly as the nin turned back to meet their eyes.

“Since then, I’ve tried to live by those words.”

Warmth spread up from Kinoe’s belly, through his chest and over his cheeks.

“You consider me a friend?”

A pained smile cracked under black spandex, and Kakashi reburied himself within the pages of his book, calling back, “Sweet dreams, princess.”

Eyes fixed on the striking silhouette across from him, Kinoe drifted off to sleep, for the first time he could remember, outside his tower, and, with courage beating in his chest.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovelies! Sorry for taking so long!
> 
> Also - just as a quick trigger warning, there is a short suicide mention, and a brief joking comment that Kakashi makes about wanting to die. Wanted to give a heads up :) 
> 
> Enjoy!

The morning met Kinoe with a gentle shake against his shoulder, and he blinked his groggy eyes open to see his silver-haired ninja escort, smirking down on him in the dark, yellow-gray sunset crowning through the trees behind him.

“Sorry to wake you,” he whispered. “But we really should start traveling soon if we’re to keep good time.”

Kinoe took a moment to bring himself back up into consciousness, and his current reality. It hadn’t all just been a dream.

He stroked Fishcake awake, much to the cat’s displeasure, and a few moments later, they began their trek again, carving through morning mist to the cheery harmony of crickets and early birds.

Marveling at the night as it rose into dawn, Kinoe trod along, very quickly having to carry Fishcake as the feline fell back into a deep, snore-full sleep.

At this Kakashi snorted, casting a glance behind himself and remarking, “See this is why I’m a dog person.”

“Your dogs don’t snore?”

Shrugging, the nin explained, “I’m not entirely sure. They don’t sleep with me unless we’re on a mission, or something of the sort. I was referring to the cat’s laziness.”

“Fishcake,” Kinoe corrected, scowling. “His name is Fishcake. And you woke us before dawn. He’s used to sleeping a few more hours before starting the day.”

“Still,” Kakashi continued. “Cats are pretty lazy, generally speaking. More cunning than loyal, too, in my experience.”

“Ironic, don’t you think, a judgmental critic on the cunning nature of cats from a shinobi...” Kinoe noted, the annoyance of his guide starting to really itch under his skin. “You’re all really like your stereotype of cats, if you think about it.”

Kakashi raised an eyebrow.

“How do you figure?”

“I’m sure you see all cats as sneaky. Trickers. Leaping all over the place with skill, grace, and the ability to outwit death. Always poised for an attack. On guard.”

The teen shot a particularly smug look up to the nin.

“ _Sassy..._ ”

Kakashi smiled secretly in amusement under his mask, as Kinoe looked forward again, chin raised proud.

“Perhaps you’re right in a few of those observations,” the nin conceded. “However, we do have our strong loyalties.”

Scoffing, and then clutching the orange full ball in a little closer, Kinoe quietly retorted, “Well, Fishcake has his loyalties, too.”

The pair walked in silence a moment, Kinoe opening his mouth again eventually, words wriggling up through his throat with a question that had begun rubbing against his curiosity a bit like a rock in his shoe since the day before.

“I...” he started cautiously.

Kakashi tossed an inquisitive glance his way.

“Go on.”

“It’s just, I was wondering,” he implored, looking down to the feline in his arms. “When you broke out of my hold, back at the tower... you weren’t ever really trapped to begin with, were you? You could have done that the whole time?”

The shinobi’s eye moved back to the horizon, somewhat audacious response slipping out of him

“Perhaps.”

“Then why?” Kinoe appealed. “Why pretend to be caught?”

“Curiosity,” Kakashi made clear. “I told you I was the good guy, too, right?”

Chewing on this, Kinoe pursed his lips.

“I expected a right-hand-man of some sorts, breaking in to Lord Orochimaru’s hideout, but you didn’t seem to quite fit that bill. At first, seeing you sleeping, breathing hard, sweating, I thought you might be sick - a test subject, or someone caught and tortured. But then you woke, and your immediate response was to engage in combat, so I went back to thinking you were a guard or an apprentice.”

The nin took a beat, cocking his head slightly before carrying on.

“And then you revealed your Wood Style, which was a massive shock. Although, I have to say, not as shocking as getting knocked out with a frying pan, that was a new one for me.”

Kinoe shrunk his shoulders at the memory, blush lighting his cheeks.

“I don’t know,” Kakashi concluded with a shrug. “Just had a feeling that I needed to dig a little deeper. Things didn’t add up, and, I guess I was a little personally curious as well.”

“Oh...” Kinoe murmured, mouth dry and lacking any more of an appropriate response.

Twigs and leaves crunched beneath their feet, morning mist clearing as the sunrise broke warmth through the trees again.

“So,” the teen blurted suddenly, deciding to go ahead and press in further while he was actually getting legitimate answers from the masked mystery man.

“How long have you been a ninja?”

“Fifteen years.”

“What?” Kinoe exclaimed in disbelief. “There’s _no_ way! How old are you?”

Kakashi let out a slightly amused hum, answering, “Twenty.“

Math calculated itself instantly in Kinoe’s head, however, he ran it over several more times, in complete rejection of it being possible.

“You’re telling me you became a ninja when you were _five years old_? That’s _absurd_!”

“Yes, well,” Kakashi explained, tone haggard and worn. “Times were hard... it was necessary...”

“Times were hard?” Kinoe repeated questioningly, earnest confusion filling him.

Kakashi stared back, scowl through his brow as if to vehemently object to Kinoe’s ignorance.

“The war...?”

When this prompting did nothing to create revelation in the young brunette, Kakashi shook his head, understanding.

“Ah, I see daddy dearest kept you sheltered from that too.”

Recoiling, Kinoe snapped back quick. “You say that like it’s a bad thing - a father protecting his son from war. You were a child - what was _your_ father doing?”

He looked up to Kakashi demanding an answer, but the nin kept his eye fixed forward, jaw set tight under his mask. The truth of his silence hit Kinoe hard in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and nearly tripling him over his own two feet.

“Your father’s dead...” he stated.

Kakashi gave a single nod.

“Killed on the battlefield?”

The heavy quiet grew again between them, Kinoe noticing his a sweat picking up in his palms, and then spreading down the back of his neck, until Kakashi at last cleared his throat.

“No... He, um, he killed himself.”

“Oh...” Kinoe breathed, a sick churn in his stomach kicking up. “So, you became a shinobi to take care of you and your mother?”

“My mother passed after giving birth to me,” Kakashi admitted. “Complications...”

Kinoe stared up at the silver-haired shinobi beside him, conflicting emotion rising through him, up past his shoulders and over his lips and nose, suffocating him in the torrent.

“You’re an orphan,” he blurted in sudden, surprised realization.

“Yes...” Kakashi replied, simply, stretching the word over his mild offense. “That _is_ what it’s called when one loses both parents...”

He really, absolutely needed to stop talking, but Kinoe could not seem to help himself. He was no longer pressing in to the shinobi’s secrets, he was now prying with hungry hands and a thundering heart, gasping for understanding.

This man could not have feelings, pain, a past. He was a ninja. Ninja were heartless. Ninja didn’t mourn or battle inner demons. He wasn’t supposed to be human. He wasn’t supposed to make Kinoe keep feeling.

“Why did your father kill himself?”

“You know, Kinoe, you’ve asked a lot of questions.” Kakashi finally bit back, playing a tiny lightness through his voice to mask the seriousness of his agitated grief. “Aren’t I supposed to have a turn here pretty soon?”

Kinoe suddenly felt very sheepish, shoulders shrinking and eyes falling to watch the stride of his feet over clumpy dirt.

It didn’t matter who he was supposed to be, or what he was supposed to, or not supposed to be doing - in this moment, Kakashi wasn’t a shinobi, he was a boy who’d lost his parents, forced to grow up alone, fighting for his own survival, and a myriad of weighty battles that he’d had no part in starting.

“Sorry...”

Kakashi sighed, and an awkward tension took up airs between the pair as they walked. In his mind, Kinoe berated himself for being so socially inept, longing to word vomit again, to apologize, to fix it. But, he knew prolonging the conversation would only dig his pit deeper, and that it would likely be best to give the shinobi a little time to come back around on his own.

And, though it felt like an uncomfortable eternity, Kakashi did end up coming back around into mild conversation a few moments later.

“Tell me why you asked about the floating lantern thing yesterday?”

“Oh, well, I’d just asked my father if I could go out and watch from the lake this year for my birthday,” Kinoe answered, fighting to keep his voice from wavering in the release of social tension. “Guess it was fresh on my mind... It’s always been my dream to go.”

“Your _dream_?” Kakashi asked, tilting his eye over skeptically.

“Yah, you know,” Kinoe offered. “Like an ambition?”

Shaking his head, the nin clarified, “I know what a dream is, I just thought it seemed a little simple to be called your dream.”

Kinoe retorted sharp and speedily. It was far too early in the morning for that kind of cocky attitude.

“Oh, and I assume you’re the authority on dreams?”

“As a matter of fact,” Kakashi teased back, smile spreading under his mask. “I am.”

Kinoe might have laughed, had he not also been a little annoyed.

“Well then, Mr. Dream-master, what’s yours?” he asked instead, not ready for the answer that came back to him.

“My dream is to die for my comrades.”

Kinoe shot his eyes over the the shinobi walking beside him, his demeanor unchanged after such a bold and dark comment.

“Your dream is to die?” Kinoe scolded. “That’s stupid. Your dream should be to _live_ so you can continue fighting.”

“Well,” Kakashi joked. “Maybe I do take after my parents a little.”

“That’s not funny.”

“No,” Kakashi agreed, a hint of playfulness still lighting his stagnant expression. “But you know what is? You just encouraged my being a shinobi.”

Thrown out of comfort and into surprise’s abrasive limbo yet again by the turn of conversation, Kinoe shook his head, defending loudly, “What? No I didn’t!”

“Yes, you did,” the nin argued simply back. “You said my dream should be to ‘live on so I can continue fighting.’”

“So?”

Kinoe adjusted Fishcake in his arms, the feline having started to stir awake against the teen’s chest.

“That doesn’t mean I endorse being a shinobi!”

Kakashi leaned in slightly, pushing his traveling companion to retract his neck, and flustering him further.

“Doesn’t it?”

Stuttering on his air before he could draw a breath, Kinoe fought for his footing in their silly debate.

“No! It means, it just... _Augh_ , you make me so _frustrated_!”

Finally straightening up, Kakashi shifted his shoulders, holding his head high, smile curled wide across his hidden lips.

“I like it.” He taunted, thoughtlessly murmuring after, “You’re cute when you’re worked up.”

“I- what?”

Kinoe felt his face grow hot, the sweat in his palms taking up new vigor, in time with a fluttering through his stomach. Having barely caught the last whiff of conversation, Fishcake lifted an eyelid in sleepy curiosity.

“I said ‘it’s cute when you get all worked up,” Kakashi replied, smooth confidence disguising his edit enough to make Kinoe doubt himself, while still betraying the flush that lit the nin’s own cheeks beneath mask cover.

Before Kinoe could question him further, Kakashi gave a short clearing of his throat, announcing, “Well, as much as I’d love to spend the rest of the morning playing twenty questions, you’d better start to prepare yourself; we’re about ten minutes outside the village.”

Kinoe came to a quick halt, the warmth from his chest icing over, thoughts exploding into a flurry, eyes stretching wide at the barrage of imagined possibilities flashing before them. What was once a light and welcome thrill through his stomach, sloshed into a sickly churn.

“Ten-ten time minutes?” He stuttered frantically. “Ten minutes time? We’ll be at the village? We’re going in the village?”

Slowing his pace and turning over his shoulder, Kakashi called back in concern, “Yes, is that... are you okay?”

Fishcake popped fully awake in Kinoe’s arms, looking up into the distressed face of his master, and then immediately over to Kakashi with a hiss.

“On your side here, Cat Nip,” the nin countered in defense. “Kinoe, we’ve been talking about reaching the village this whole time. What’s the sudden hold up?”

“I just, I...” Kinoe sputtered. “I guess I didn’t realize we’d be going through the village... isn’t it really dangerous?”

All Orochimaru had ever told Kinoe of life outside the tower, was how wildly, chaotically dangerous it was, and how unfit he would be to survive in it. Shinobi. Thugs. Criminals. Corrupt leadership. Broken justice systems. The man had painted quite a horrific picture again and again. The village was fuel for nightmares and repellent to curiosity. And here, they were ten minutes outside it, and Kakashi continued to walk backwards towards it, nonchalantly shrugging his shoulders.

“Not really, no,” he answered. “Sure, the village is full of potentially dangerous people, as it is a shinobi village. But, it’s actually probably one of the safest places you could be.”

When Kinoe didn’t start walking, and continued to lose himself in the possibilities that his father had described for him so many times, Kakashi finally stopped.

“Listen, Kinoe...” the nin started, wringing a hand through the silver mess of his hair. “I’d say we could go around the village to reach our destination, but, cutting through is the absolute quickest way. I’m going to be with you the whole way.”

Kinoe blinked, eyes refocusing on his guide.

“Besides, we’d get to grab some real food, and we could stay at an inn tonight, rather than camping outside.”

The shinobi offered a wistful smile and an outstretched hand.

“You’ve trusted me this far, haven’t you?”

Swallowing, Kinoe nodded ever so slightly, looking again to the feline curled in his arms for affirmation.

“Okay... but only because Fishcake and I can’t handle any more of your horrid food pills.”

Face falling, Kakashi turned on his heel, starting after the village again, casting back an extremely sarcastic laugh and twisting his offered hand of help up into the teasing point of his middle finger.

This broke a slight smile and scoff through Kinoe’s panic, and the teen managed to summon his courage once more to brave after the shinobi in front of him.

Reaching the village border, Kakashi informed the pair that they’d be using his private-access side entrance avoid drawing attention, or instigating a premature report on Kinoe from the village guards. Being the captain of an elite secret team did have its perks, Kinoe supposed.

“Underwhelmed?” Kakashi asked as Kinoe looked quietly over the dank, dark streets as they crossed the village border line.

“A bit...” Kinoe confirmed, trying not to let the somewhat seedy scene shake him up.

“Don’t make your judgement just yet, come here.”

Crossing in front, Kakashi waved the brunette forward, and broke the pair of them onto the street and out in the daylight.

Kinoe’s senses burst into overflow. As if standing under a waterfall, he soaked in every sight and sound, the expanse of tiered architecture, houses, shops, and structures, all piled on top of each other in a mess of yellow walls, flowered windows, and painted signs, each building with its own uniquely colored roofing. Though the immediate street in front of him happened to be more scarcely populated, Kinoe was bombarded with the sounds of village life - children laughing, the siblings shouting, crying, singing, masses of adults with smiles on their faces, conversations flowing between them. With it all, the smells reached Kinoe too - warm, savory something’s wafting through the afternoon air as restaurants opened, and food carts readied for business.

Kakashi simply smiled at Kinoe’s open mouth.

“How about _now_?”

“Wow...” was all the brunette could manage, and Kakashi gave a gentle laugh, nudging his traveling companion on the shoulder.

“Come on, we’ll reserve a room for the night at an inn or something, and then we’ll get a meal, rest a bit, regroup and travel on.”

“We’re not going to your place?”

“Uh, no,” Kakashi explained. “I kind of live in a secret headquarters. Captain of an elite team, remember?”

Nodding, Kinoe forced his feet after his guide in a perfect twist of thrill and terror to be inside the village gate at last. In one breath he told himself to trust Kakashi, and in the other, he scolded himself for the very notion of trusting a shinobi, assuring himself that this little rebellious adventure would absolutely spell death at its end.

And yet, Kinoe journeyed on.

Moving through the city streets, even on the outskirts of the village, made for quite the absurd challenge with all of Kinoe’s hair. Within a matter of minutes, the teen found himself fighting to capture the full length of the tresses in an overflowing bundle.

“I can get it up in a braid. But, I have to stretch it out straight and use my-"

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Kakashi interrupted urgently. “I’ll get us to the closest inn. Come on.”

Carving though the busy streets as best they could, they soon spotted a quaint little in, and made their way for the entrance, only to be stopped midway through the door.

“Heeey! Kakashiiii!” A man whooped from down the road.

Kakashi swore under his breath.

“Who’s that?” Kinoe asked, straining to lay wide eyes on a young man, dressed head-to-toe in a bright, kelly green sweatsuit, a neat and shining bowl-cut of black hair, and the bushiest pair of eye brows he’d ever seen. Behind him, a young lady with dark wavy hair, and piercing red eyes, and a gruff looking man with a lit cigarette hanging lazily out the side of his mouth. All three of them bore shinobi hitai-ate.

“My friends,” Kakashi groaned. “Don’t make eye contact. Let’s just go inside.”

The nin gave a guiding push to Kinoe’s low back, desperate to get them through the doors and out of his comrade’s range of interaction.

“We’re hiding from your friends?”

“I do it all the time. They’re used to it, come on,” Kakashi insisted, growing rather panicky as the trio made their way closer.

“I want to meet them,” Kinoe stated simply, crossing out of his guide’s grasp and the inn’s threshold in defiance.

“Kinoe, no! Stop!”

But it was too late, the brunette met eyes with the jumpsuit-clad nin, who’s face now exploded with beaming toothy smile.

“Ohh!! Kakashi!! Who is this,” he exclaimed, bounding up to meet them. “A friend? A new rival? Have you replaced me? I challenge you sir!”

Exasperated, Kakashi rubbed his forehead into his palms, sighing loudly.

The woman chuckled, she and the other man drawing up to meet his counterpart.

“Uh, Gai, I don’t think you need to be worried about this young man being a new rival,” she mused. “That is, unless I am mistaken, and Kakashi normally rushes his rivals inside hotels on the outskirts on the village in the early afternoon...”

“Kurenai, please,” Kakashi objected, face flushing under his mask. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Mmmhm...”

She shared a look with the man beside her, amused smirk pursing her lips.

“Well, are you going to introduce us?” the man asked, letting a stream of smoke escape out the side of his cigarette.

Shaking his head in defeat, Kakashi sighed again.

“Guys, this is a new acquaintance of mine, Kinoe.”

“Nice to meet you, Kinoe!” Gai exclaimed with a quick, short bow.

“Oh, um, hi,” the brunette replied, suddenly very uncomfortable in his own skin, and suddenly very aware that his arms were full extremely with over twenty meters of tangled hair.

“And what are you two _acquaintances_ up to today?” Kurenai questioned, speculation thick through her teasing tone.

Much to Kakashi’s frustration and further embarrassment, his traveling companion took the liberty of giving an explanation at the same time Kakashi did.

“Kakashi’s escorting me as part of his mission...” -- “Kinoe’s a traveler here for the Memorial Festival...”

The pair trailed off, Kinoe looking rather sheepishly to the shinobi’s glare.

“I was just helping him get settled at his inn...” he finished, silently fuming, and turning back to the unconvinced smirks of his peers.

“ _Mmmmmmmhmm..._ ” the woman repeated, dragging her amusement through the sing-song sarcasm.

“That’s the mission I was talking about,” Kinoe carried on, despite Kakashi growling for him to shut up. “I’m from out of town... The Hidden Sound Village...”

“The Hidden Sound Village??” The overly-animated man bellowed.

“Oh yes, you’ve never heard of The Hidden Sound Village, Gai? It’s definitely exists.”

“Uh, right... Kakashi was just assigned to oversee my stay and take me to the festival.”

At this point, the man with the cigarette no longer hold back a chortle.

“Well, Kinoe,” he smiled. “Welcome to The Hidden Leaf Village. I’m Sarutobi Asuma, this is the lovely and ferocious Yuhi Kurenai, and the screaming idiot that has somehow managed not to be the most embarrassing part of this conversation, is Maito Gai. We’re old school mates of Kakashi’s, and long-time friends.”

Kinoe grinned, nodding, and then looking towards the feline at his feet.

“Also, this is Fishcake, my cat.”

Kurenai swooned toward the apprehensive tabby, Asuma digging in a small satchel attached to his belt, pulling out a small piece of jerky and winning the feline over.

“Kinoe! You should also know - I am Kakashi’s eternal rival!” Gai immediately shouted, enthusiastically punching his fist in the air.

“Rival?”

In an effort to end this interaction, Kakashi nudged slightly once more against the small of Kinoe’s back, murmuring, “It’s nothing, just this silly game we play. Come on, we should really get you situated; you’re standing here holding a hundred pounds of hair.”

Gai squealed in protest, fists flexed and veins bulging.

“Oh! Kakashi! You trivialize our great, endless rivalry! Dishonor!”

“They compete each other back and forth in ridiculous challenges they make up,” Asuma explained, Fishcake snug in his arms and chewing another piece of jerky. “They’ve done it since they were children.”

Thoroughly tickled by this new knowledge, Kinoe broke a large smile over to his shrinking shinobi, remarking, “How _fun_!”

“Kakashi, I challenge you right here, right now!”

“Gai, not now, I’m...” Kakashi raked his brain for an excuse, moaning in regret when he remembered the one that had been forced into play. “On a mission... apparently... remember?”

The bushy-browned nin simply roared on, face nearly purple.

“You belittled the name of our eternal rivalry! You disgraced the power of youth!”

“What about me?” Kinoe suddenly piped up, the words bursting out of his mouth before they had time to filter through rationale. “You challenged me first.”

All four shinobi gaped at the newcomer. Asuma and Kurenai quickly fell into laughter, what was visible of Kakashi’s face running pale, and Gai’s vigor re-enthused and multiplied ten-fold.

“Kinoe!!” He shrieked.

Smiling, Kinoe released a small giddy laugh of his own, all the while, the voices in his mind at war.

What on earth was he doing? Accepting a challenge from a random, strange shinobi in the streets? Not even thirty minutes had passed since the teen had entered the Village for his first time, accompanied by an elite ninja that had broken into his house, and was trying to convince him that his life was a lie, and he willingly volunteers himself for an unknown challenge for which he likely extremely unprepared for?

But then, that was it - there really had been no thought to it at all. Only instinct.

There he was, in the open, free of his tower, more curious of the man called Kakashi, more uncertain of the world in which he truly lived, and somehow more confident in himself than he’d ever been. And those were feelings worth chasing, never mind the risk.

Kakashi would keep him safe. He’d proved himself worthy of trust thus far, right?

“What is even going on anymore?” the silver-haired shinobi lamented to the sky, gloved hands melting down his face.

His dissatisfaction was enough to break Kinoe’s glowing pursuit.

“Oh, I mean... I’m sorry...” the brunette stumbled, snapping back to his reality and feeling very foolish. “I just thought it sounded like fun...”

“No,” Kakashi sighed reluctantly. “Go ahead, I guess... If that’s what you want to do, I’m not going to stop you.”

Hope sparked back into dark, almond eyes.

“Really?”

Kakashi nodded, warning with a grin, “Just know, you’ll probably end up getting your ass kicked.”

Fishcake shot a scowl over to the nin, even though the smack-talk brought a laugh from his master.

“Whatever!” Kinoe smarted back. “If I remember correctly, I _have_ knocked you out a time or two.”

“Yah, yah,” Kakashi waved him off, ignoring the shocked recoil of his friends. “Those were cheap shots, and your know it, princess.”

“ _Princess_?” Kurenai probed, brow raising.

“Of The Hidden Sound Village,” Kakashi spat back in all seriousness, not skipping a beat.

Kurenai rolled her eyes.

“ _Riiight_.”

“Let’s find an open training field!” Gai cried out, no longer able to contain himself through the banter of his comrades.

“We’re not far off from The Academy,” Asuma suggested. “Could use one of theirs.”

Kinoe watched as Kakashi’s trio of friends turned to start after a training field, expecting him and Kakashi to follow. An orange head popped up from over Asuma’s shoulder, looking back for his master to follow or call him back. Swallowing, the brunette turned to his guide.

The nin gestured his arm forward.

“After you.”

This was what he’d wanted to do, wasn’t it. To loose his instinct? To chase the feeling? To take the risk?

He squeezed his eyes tight, living through flashes of his life in the tower, imprisoned, alone, ill, desperate, aching, and then - leaping, falling down through the air into freedom, uncertain of what the world appear beneath his feet.

Yes, it was what he wanted.

Eyes popping open, Kinoe strode on.

“Let’s do this.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovelies! I am so very sorry for taking eight thousand years to get this chapter to you. I very much hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Trigger warning - PTSD, panic attacks, and mild banter about wanting to self-harm/die.

“Are all of your challenges normally this ridiculous?” Kinoe asked, giving a testing tug against the rope binding an arm behind his back.

“Yes, yes they are,” Asuma answered flatly. He sucked back a long drag from his cigarette, and then added through the exhale of smoke, “Sometimes, _far_ more ridiculous.”

“Silence!” Gai bellowed, his own arm secured as well. “Now, Kinoe, Highness of the The Sound Village, are you ready to engage in youthful contest and gage your prowess against the power of Konoha’s Mighty Blue Beast?!”

The teen looked to Fishcake, and then across to Kakashi, who directed a hand back to Kinoe with a shrug and a smirk.

“Let’s do it!”

“Alright gentlemen,” Kurenai announced decidedly. “The challenge issued has been a contest to see who can climb to the top of this cliff-side the fastest, with one arm behind their back. Neither of you are permitted to use jutsu of any kind, and any falls to the bottom will result in immediate disqualification. Are there any questions, comments, concerns, or regrets?”

“I have a few regrets to mention,” Asuma interjected from the side.

Kurenai ignored him, apparently quite used to dealing with the dry, sarcastic wit.

“No? Alright, on your marks, get set, go!”

Leaping into action, both men began to scramble-scale of one of The Leaf Village’s smaller cliff-sides. Kinoe immediately noticed how far out of his league he was in comparison to Gai. This challenge demanded the specific use of skill, experience and muscle that Kinoe had never found need or means to exercise. To be fair, however, he hadn’t dreamed that any run-in with ninja would lead to a contest of friendly rivalry with such absurd demands. Still, Kinoe held his own, scaling the cliff-side quickly as he could, staying only a body-length behind his competitor.

Fishcake paced nervously below, unblinking as he watched the challenge unfold. 

"Hey," Kakashi called. "You can relax, Catnip. I'm not going to let him fall."

“You might need to act on that pretty soon here,” Asuma warned, nodding upward.

Having lost his footing on a loose rock, Kinoe dangled from one arm about fifty feet up.

Gritting his teeth, sweat and dirt streaking down his forehead and cheeks, he tightened the slipping grip of his aching fingers, and pushing to the back of his mind the scream of his muscles. Giving up was not an option. 

“Kakashi…” Kurenai warned.

“I see. He’s not going to fall.”

Both Asuma and Kurenai looked skeptically over to their silver-haired companion, bodies instinctively tensing for action.

In the next blink of an eye, Kinoe executed the unthinkable, releasing his grip all together, and allowing his body to plummet below.

“Wait…” Kakashi demanded, outstretching and arm to block the panicked sprint of his friends. Instead, the shinobi watched, beaming with pride, as Kinoe caught the length of his hair, looped it in hand, and lassoed it upward to catch on a single, bare tree branch that jutted our from the cliff’s rocky face. The teen yanked to a halt, hanging by silky brown and his clever recklessness.

“Wow… Well, okay, impressive, but what’s he going to do now?” Kurenai wondered aloud, Kakashi simply shushing her in response, staring, awe-stricken as Kinoe began to swing his body back and forth to build momentum.

In his mind echoed the words of his father. Not strong enough. Not smart enough. Not capable. With each swing, the wind whipping through his ears silenced the ring of insult and doubt. The challenge to beat Gai faded into black, even his desire to prove himself strong to the shinobi watching below. The challenge then existed only against his belief in himself.

“Is he…?”

“I think so…”

“Shhhh… Watch.”

Gai nearly had reached the top of the cliff, completely focused and relentlessly charging ahead. Below him, Kinoe in grand, sweeping swings, waited through one final rise and return before launching himself upward, releasing the grip of his hair, flipping head over heels through the air, and landing with a messy tumble into the dirt at the cliff’s summit.

Kurenai erupted into amazed cheering, Asuma beside her whispering, “I’ll be damned,” with a shake of his head and a laugh. Kakashi simply beamed, asking Fishcake if he’d like to go for a little ride without looking away from the sweaty brunette far above them.

In a flash, he scooped the feline up and made a nimble ascent to meet their victor.

Stunned smile over his face, Kinoe peered down in assessment of what he'd actually just somehow accomplished. He'd done it. Having launched himself into such insane, anomalous activity in the pursuit of his own instinct, he hadn't imagined what would possibly come of it. There'd been nothing like it so far in his life. To live, to play, to take risk, to climb, struggle, fall, and soar... It left him breathless and beaming, glowing of his own sweat as the sunlight broke through white clouds as if to shine down its own radiant, victorious spotlight. 

“Kinoe! That was incredible! What an astounding display of youth! I demand a rematch at once!” Gai exclaimed, having pulled himself up and rushing a few inches away from Kinoe’s flushing face.

“Oh, I don’t know, it was just dumb luck, you’re the real athlete here,” he excused, despite how much the complements swelled in his chest.

"Don't write yourself off," Kakashi countered. "That was spectacular." 

Fishcake withdrew stiff claws from their grip in Kakashi's arm, escaping the nin's grasp and meowing up at his master with terrified eyes. 

“I-I, well, thank you," Kinoe stuttered. He knelt, petting a hand over Fishcake, and attempting to disguise how greatly the pink in his cheeks had intensified under Kakashi's praise. "I think one challenge is more than enough for me now. I’m pretty beat.”

Gai howled in protest, anxious to defend his honor.

“I’m sure Kakashi would answer a challenge in Kinoe’s stead,” Kurenai smiled, she and Asuma having joined the others.

At this, Gai nearly exploded on the spot.

“Uh, I mean, Kinoe and I should probably be going soon…” 

“We should?” Kinoe asked softly, having stood for Kakashi to cut free his binds. “I mean… I’d enjoy seeing you spar or something… If you want…” 

Sly grins swept from Asuma to Kurenai, and Gai hooked an arm around Kinoe’s neck, announcing boisterously, “Hey, Kakashi, this one seems to have the right spirit! I like him!”

“Alright, alright,” Kakashi sighed, a tiny hint of genuine excitement betraying his annoyed airs. “One short challenge.”

Immediately, Gai set in on him, issuing promises of certain victory, warning of new technique and training since their last spar, and outlining the rules of their match.

As the jump-suited nin babbled on, Kakashi nodded endlessly, stretching out a bit and casting already exhausted glances back here and there to his comerades.

“Hey,” Asuma called to Kinoe as he and Kurenai crossed over. He extended a canteen to the brunette, along with congratulations for beating Gai.

Kinoe shook his head, attributing his win once again to luck and taking a few deep gulps of water.

“Thank you, Asuma.”

“Thank _you_ ,” the nin corrected, taking back his canteen. “Been ages since we’ve gotten Kakashi to stick around for longer than a minute.”

Not knowing how to respond, Kinoe looked to Fishcake, and then over to his guide, finally setting a stance for combat, and pulling back his hitai-ate to reveal the red pierce of his hidden eye.

“Ah, there it is,” Asuma breathed. “Taking this one seriously, eh Kakashi?”

“Of course,” Kurenai answered for him. “He has a princess to impress.”

Ignoring them, Kakashi kept his attention on the all-too-eager man across from him with his legs in a wide, deep stance, one arm tucked behind his back, and the other bent forward him, posed for action, and ready to strike.

“You gentlemen ready?” Kurenai asked, again playing the referee. The pair gave a sharp nod, stillness hanging only a brief moment longer as their companion shouted, “begin!” The rest that followed was the most elegant, terrifying, intricate display of violence. Both shinobi, in a flurry of green and gray, bore into one another fists, knees, feet and elbows an exchanged rush of mastered skill and overwhelming force.

Kinoe swallowed hard. Kakashi had been holding back on him in the tower more than he’d even imagined.

Taijutsu developed further as Kakashi drew a pair of kunai from a pack on his thigh, spinning them in his grip before flying forward into the fray, Gai countering with a pair of nunchucks that seemed to appear out of nowhere. The two carried on for a moment more before Kakashi dove into the use of ninjutsu. Gai escaped a cracking blue lightning blade with a series of backflips, landing with a guttural yell, his body bursting into a raging blue-green chakra explosion. The shinobi’s eyes went white, his black hair standing on end, the dirt around him quaking and swirling at his feet. Kakashi simply smirked in response, and then, unleashed the full range of his chakra natures in a spectacle of elemental mastery.

Earth. Water. Fire. Lightning. Each seamlessly sewn together, used to amplify one another, and to defend from the mass destruction in the wake of Gai’s radiation of wild, unfiltered energy.

Shinobi… So this was what they _truly_ looked like in action…

Kinoe swallowed again, this time a nervous curl growing between his lips.

He should have been afraid, lost in the warnings of his father, mortified that these gods of weaponry and war could turn on him in an instant, wield their immense ability to end his life before he could brace against the blow. And yet, all the brunette could feel, standing and soaking in the sight of everything he’d been haunted by, and kept prisoner from, was an all encompassing awe, and the light of a fire to join them.

“Couple of show offs…” Asuma huffed, shaking his head and twisting a cigarette butt out into ash under his foot.

“Couple of _idiots_ is more like it,” Kurenai added with a snicker.

Briefly distracted from the fighting by what he imagined romance to look like sparking between the two, Kinoe fought the urge to ask if they were involved. He struggled to decide if it was socially acceptable to ask such things. But, having never seen or been near relational scenarios of the like, his heart leapt at the opportunity to understand these foreign feelings. Kinoe's mouth opened, interrupted however, by the reality that he was still in fact, on an extremely active training field. 

From the corner of his eye, a blast of fire erupted into view, growing quick, and burning up the air from the teen’s lungs. Without a thought, Kinoe slammed his palms together, turning to shield Fishcake and the others as the blaze licked dangerously close.

"Mokuton!" he cried. 

When Kinoe reopened his eyes, he looked up to see Kurenai and Asuma, safe with him under the cover of the wooden dome he’d created, and, for the first time since the sparring match began, shaken to the very core.

Kakashi’s form appeared between his friends and Kinoe within the blink of an eye, his chest heaving, and his arms up in defense.

“I need you to hear me out...”

“Kakashi...” Kurenai gaped. “Is what... did he...”

“Yes,” Kakashi confirmed. “Kinoe possesses Wood Style.”

Both Asuma and Kurenai exploded into simultaneous questioning, finally sending unease down Kinoe’s spine, and shrinking him down behind his guide’s protective stance.

Gai made his way over, body no longer radiating chakra, looking rather haggard and heavy.

“Rival?”

“My apologies, but our match will have to conclude for today. You can take it as a concession from me, but I need to move along with Kinoe for now.”

Asuma stepped forward, reaching out as if to grab the arm of his aloof, long-time friend.

“Wait. Kakashi, what is going on?”

The silver haired shinobi cast a look back to Kinoe, gritting his teeth a moment, and then turning back to explain plainly, “I truly am on a mission right now. Kinoe has become a part of it, and caused it to take a turn. I can’t explain any further now, and I’m sure you can understand that. There’s much of this I am needing to understand myself at this point, too. Until I can get things more solidified, and come up with a course of action that suits all parties, I will not be making a report of Kinoe’s discovery or abilities, and I ask... that you do the same... please...”

All three shinobi said nothing, staring deep into the burning, mismatched gaze across from them.

“I realize what I’m asking of you. But, I promise I am only doing what I must... For Kinoe, and for the sake of the Village...”

Gai gave a sharp nod, clasping a hand over his rival’s shoulder.

“You have my word.”

He turned to Kinoe, bright, wide, goofy smile plastered back over his face, and offered a hand to pull the teen up.

Slowly, Asuma and Kurenai nodded in agreement as well.

“We trust you, Kakashi...”

“You have our word as well, and anything that we can do to offer aid is only a call away.”

Shifting uncomfortably on his feet, Kakashi nodded in return, thanking his friends softly, and then turning to the brunette behind him.

“I’m sorry to make you think my jutsu were getting out of control. Are you and Fishcake alright?”

Kinoe nodded sheepishly, staring down to his fidgeting feet.

“Good, then let’s get you checked in somewhere to rest a bit. I’m starving. The sooner we get there, the sooner we can order dinner.”

“Kakashi, wait, come eat with us,” Kurenai suggested eagerly. “No one saw earlier. He’d be safe to come have a meal, right?”

Opening his mouth to protest, Kakashi found himself cut short by friends that had apparently tired of the same old song from the nin.

“Come on, you old hermit, you’ve already socialized with us some. You might as well finish strong and come out for dinner.”

Kakashi raised his hands to plead slightly insincere forgiveness.

“I will sometime soon guys, I promise.”

“Oh, he _promises_ …”

“Heard that one before.”

“Really,” Kakashi insisted. “I mean it this time.”

“Yah, yah,” Asuma sighed, relenting. “Run along then, you big asshole.”

Turning his attention, the gruff, beard man extended a hand to shake the Kinoe's.

“It was wonderful to meet you, and you too Fishcake. We hope to see you again soon.”

All three of Kakashi’s old schoolmates smiled warmly over the teen, Gai offering a last assurance before they parted ways.

“Your secret is safe with us.”

Before they could make it off the training field, Kinoe began apologizing profusely for revealing his Wood Style. Kakashi simply waved him off, assuring the brunette that it would be alright.

“Just maybe try to keep a tighter reign on the Kekkei Genkai reflexes while we’re inside the Village for now, hm?”

The shinobi offered what appeared to be a wink, having pulled his hitai-ate back down to rest his eye.

Fighting the impulse to continue apologizing, Kinoe instead asked with piqued curiosity, "Why is my Mokuton such a big deal anyway? I mean, I know Kekkei Genkai are rare, but the way they looked at me... Would they really have hurt me?"

"Hurt you?" Kakashi wondered. "Why would they hurt you?"

"Because, wouldn't I be seen as a threat?"

Raising an eyebrow, the nin leaded in slightly.

"Do you plan on threatening The Village?"

"No," Kinoe replied with a frown. "But when has that ever stopped shinobi?"

Kakashi released a sigh, confessing, "You're not wrong in believing that the system is imperfect. It is. A lot of horrific, detrimental mistakes have been made throughout the years. But, from the beginning, the heart of what shinobi are supposed to be, and what we are supposed to do has remained true and unchanged. Protect the Village. Promote peace. I know that's not what you've grown up hearing, but, it's what I've grown up experiencing... even with all my own... Anyway, no, they wouldn't have attacked you. If anything, they likely would have tried to recruit you."

Kinoe stopped in his tracks, the nin's words like lightning, paralyzing his body and mind. 

"Recruit me...?" 

Splashes of amusement, surprise and pride filled Kinoe, quickly swirling into a nauseating concoction of confusion through his stomach. 

Kakashi simply walked on ahead, casually calling for his traveling companion to keep up if they were going to make it to an inn before nightfall. 

Again, Kinoe faced the conflict of his desire. Turn and run, or carry on in trust. Shaking his head, he renewed his resolve to pursue instinct without regret, and tucked in behind the footsteps of his guide as they carved through the city streets. 

Eventually, the brunette paused their travel to briefly reel in the length of his hair to avoid it from being stepped on any more than it already had been. It was also in this pause that Kakashi noticed the fatigued drag of the fluffy orange tabby trying to keep pace with them, and motioned for the cat to ride out the rest of their trek through the Village in the nin’s arms. Though he refused at first, a block later, and Fishcake leapt up from behind Kakashi, climbing over his shoulder and nestling comfortably against his chest.

A silent smirk flashed between Kakashi and Kinoe, and with it, the shinobi nodded in front of them toward a small building just ahead. Tucked away from the rest, and cloaked by the blended pastel bloom of floral trees and wildflowers, their inn. 

“Hello. A room for two, and one cat, please.”

Behind the front desk, an old woman, stern-faced and squinting, slowly looked the trio up and down.

“No rooms open with multiple single beds,” she croaked.

“Oh, that’s fine.”

Kinoe’s face instantly heated as he snapped wide, bewildered eyes to Kakashi.

“I won’t need a bed,” the nin explained calmly. “I won’t be sleeping, remember?”

“Wait, no, you have to-"

“We’ll take a room, please.”

The old woman stared for a long, judgmental moment, her scowl seething into Kakashi, who simply closed his eyes and grinned wide beneath his mask.

Slowly, she turned to look at Kinoe, narrowing her squint further and asking in a low, raspy whisper, “How old are you, boy?”

“I, uh, I’m seventeen ma’am… but I turn eighteen tomorrow…”

Grunting in disapproving surrender, the innkeeper turned reached below the desk to produce and present a check-in book and a room key.

Kakashi signed them in, snatched up the key, and gave a chipper “thank you." He then ushered them up stairs and into their room, purposefully ignoring the daggers glaring into his back as he strode away.

Shaking off the embarrassment of the whole encounter, Kinoe refocused himself with his guide’s stubborn over-protection.

“Kakashi, you have to sleep at least a little,” he demanded indignantly. “You’ve been awake, what? At least 30 hours now? Probably longer.”

The shinobi shrugged.

“It’s not a big deal. I often go without sleep on missions. I’m still on a mission. I’m going to keep watch.”

He gave a reassuring grin, stepping forward and offering, “Would you like me to help you straighten out your hair?”

At this, Fishcake leapt from Kakashi's arms and down onto the downy quilt of their bed, swatting his tail over the shinobi’s face rather harshly on his way.

“Um, sure,” Kinoe nodded, still wanting to press the matter of Kakashi’s sleeplessness, but distracted by that familiar flutter from the morning finding its way back in his stomach. 

“That’d be nice, thank you.”

A flash of quiet hesitancy between them radiated it’s warmth, bringing with it a slight giddiness when Kakashi took in hand the massive bundle of brown locks, remarking thoughtlessly, and nearly inaudible, “Soft... smells like wildflowers...”

Immediately, Fishcake gave a loud wretch against a hairball that most certainly did not exist. The orange feline looked up with smug expression in a mock apology for his harsh interruption.

“Here,” Kinoe continued, taking back an armful of hair and beginning to lay it out around the room, Kakashi still holding the bundle as it grew smaller and smaller in his hands, fingers appreciatively gliding through the silky brown. Within a few minutes, and with a few directions to his aid, Kinoe had his hair trailing in a large spiral over the floor and bed, a heavy exhaustion weighing down his bones.

He braced against the oncoming flare-up sure to rear its ugly head, desperate to will it away. 

Instead, the teen drew in a breath, clasped his hands together, and called out for the release of his Mokuton. Kakashi’s eye grew wide as he watched tiny, thin, vine-like roots sprout out the top of Kinoe’s head, growing quickly down through the swirling length of silky hair. Much to the nin’s wonderment, Kinoe used the roots to manipulate his hair, folding it up on top of itself a time or two, and then weaving the tresses into a thick, neat braid.

Once finished, he let his hand-sign fall slack, his breathing labored and brow sweaty.

“Wow,” Kakashi exhaled. “That was incredible.”

Impulsively, the shinobi reached out a hand to brush a stray strand into the rest of Kinoe’s updo, his gentle gesture interrupted yet again by a loud, needless wretch from Fishcake.

“Do you need a bowl of water?” Kakashi spat, turning a glare over to the smirking feline. He sighed, shaking his head slightly, just as Kinoe fell weak through his knees, the weight too heavy, and casting a black veil over his vision.

“Kinoe!” Kakashi exclaimed, catching the teen by his shoulders, and easing him over into bed. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Kinoe lied weakly, trying to wave the shinobi off and sit back up. “Just a dizzy spell.”

Fishcake had bound to his master’s side, pressing his forehead against a clammy cheek.

“I’m alright, buddy...”

“You overworked yourself. I'm sure the adrenaline from your cliff-climbing and hair-bungeeing has finally worn off, and the exhaustion has caught up,” Kakashi comforted. “Just rest for a bit. I’ll get you some water and order some food up to the room. You can close your eyes while it’s coming.”

The urge to dig deeper into the lie that he wasn’t in fact in desperate need of rest fizzled away as Kakashi lifted the cozy and green quilt from the foot of the bed, fluffing it to float over the dizzy brunette.

“Alright... just a moment though.”

Nodding, Kakashi looked to Fishcake and promised to order a bit of something for the feline to eat as well.

The door hadn’t closed and Kinoe was nearly unconscious, swept away by the frailty that he’d wished against with every fiber of his being.

It’d been foolish of him to engage in such rigorous ridiculousness with Gai. It’d been foolish of him to play at fun and camaraderie with shinobi. Of course he was suffering a flare up.

At least, so scolded the voice of Orochimaru through Kinoe’s troubled mind.

A few moments later, Kakashi returned, moving silently about their small room as to let his traveling companion rest. The nin washed, ran through a few stretching combinations, and then settled on the floor, pouring over his little orange book, the door and a sleeping Kinoe safely locked in his periphery.

With a gentle knock, their room service was delivered, and the shinobi called softly to the young man resting soundly with fluffy orange tabby.

“I’m sorry to wake you, but, food is here,” Kakashi whispered as Kinoe stirred against his pillow. “I’m sure refueling will make a big difference for you.”

Bringing a tray over to his bedside, Kakashi set Kinoe up with generous portions of yakisoba, a large glass of water, and a steaming cup of tea.

Once his traveling companion was served and settled, the shinobi offered a small plate and water dish to Fishcake. Only then did did he begin to serve himself.

Kinoe looked down into his plate, his lips pursing, smile fading.

“Hey, You okay?” Kakashi asked, pausing his seventh scoop of steaming noodles. “Do you not like yakisoba?

His lips parted, words in a tangle between reason, fear, and trust.

“I think,” he started, quite unsure of the leap he was taking. “I need to tell you something…”

“Okay, is everything alright?”

The brunette stared back into his dinner, and Kakashi set down his plate and serving tongs, sitting on the end of the bed and leaning forward.

“Kinoe?”

“Yes, I mean…” the teen answered, the confession forcing its way past warning and doubt. “I’m ill… like, since I was a child. I have episodes of severe weakness that come on without warning or cause.”

Kakashi nodded in slow acceptance, the gears of his mind turning over each hint and clue that he’d missed previously, little wrenches getting caught in the gears of his logic here and there in the processing.

“And that’s what you’re experiencing now?” The shinobi questioned, Kinoe nodding in response before letting out a sigh. Both men held each other’s eyes a moment. Kakashi knew there had to be more, and Kinoe, he’d already taken the plunge, might as well dive deep.

“My hair didn’t always grow like this…” he continued, pulling the thick braid around and running a hand down rich, chocolately twists and turns. “My father said that it started after our clan was killed, and that, at the same time, my episodes started up. Thinking the two might be connected, he tried to cut a piece of my hair…”

He paused a moment, and lifted the large braid to reveal a tiny, hidden lock of hair only about two inches long.

“I spent the next several months in a coma… Father cared for me the whole time. We moved up into the tower, for safety, and he dedicated his life to try and find a cure for whatever is wrong with me. As you can see, the piece never grew back.”

Kinoe let his hair rest again, and slipped it behind his shoulder.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Kakashi implored, visible eye brimming with concerned frustration. Kinoe nearly squirmed under the caring attention, his mouth drying.

“I-I didn’t know what you’d do…” the brunette explained. “I didn’t want to make myself more vulnerable.”

Giving a semi-understanding nod, Kakashi let out a tense breath.

“I’m very glad you told me now, and I’m sorry that you’ve dealt with this aliment your whole life. Do you need anything? Any kind of medicine? I can get a doctor, or-"

“No, I’m alright,” Kinoe interrupted, not wanting any more of a fuss made over him. “This is just a very minor flare up. I feel much better now, honestly, and the food should give me the rest of my strength back.”

Accepting this, Kakashi went back to piling his plate higher, encouraging gently, “Eat then, please.”

The shinobi grinned at the mountain of food he’d served himself, and then, turning back to stop Kinoe mid-bite, and off-guard, he suddenly urged very seriously, “Hey, promise me you’ll tell me if you feel anything coming on, or if you need anything at all?”

The teen slurped straggling noodles into full and flushing cheeks, nodding slowly after.

Why did this shinobi care what he needed? Why was he sorry for suffering that had nothing to do with him? Why did it make his stomach turn like this? It felt like cascading down from his tower again, and again, exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. Where did one land, after falling through such dangerous emotions?

“Good.”

Kakashi retreated to the spot he’d been watching from earlier, setting aside his chopsticks and plate a brief moment to weave signs to mask the unveiling of his face with jutsu before hungrily tearing in to the sheer mass of yakisoba he'd served himself.

Kinoe watched him eat, slightly distracted at the unsettling, although amusing sight of noodles disappearing through non-existent black spandex. What a trick of the eyes, he mused to himself.

“Still with the mask?” He asked, prepping another bite for himself.

“Always.”

Kinoe rolled his eyes at the extra snark that came peppered over the nin’s reply.

“Is that why you don’t eat with your friends?”

Kakashi hummed in thought, and then offered one of his mysterious, and obnoxiously uninformative answers. “Partially…”

Kinoe wasn’t having it.

“And the other part?”

“Well,” Kakashi smirked, eyes closing and shoulders giving a slight shrug. “I suppose you’re not the only one afraid of being vulnerable…”

Kinoe’s mouth opened, a sigh escaping him.

“But, they’re you’re friends…”

“Right,” Kakashi nodded. “I don’t need them any closer than they already are.”

Kinoe’s eyes narrowed as he asked rather saucily, “Because you’re going to die for them?”

The nin smiled wide beneath his false mask covering, smug, dark humor hanging over him like a black cloud that he believed to somehow be a halo instead.

“ _Exactly_.”

For the first time, the implications of Kakashi’s dream and joking struck with the fullness of their reality. This ninja, this man, who ever he was to Kinoe, he truly was a danger to  
himself. He actively kept his friends at bay. He dug himself into his work, swore himself into deeper and deeper levels of secrecy, and readily threw himself into harms way with  
reckless abandon. Part of him truly did want to die.

“Kakashi…”

“Are you through eating?” The silver-haired shinobi asked, cool, and collected. “I was going to get a second helping for myself? Would you like one too.”

Kinoe swallowed in an attempt to bring his heart back down from his throat, and stop it from climbing out of his mouth, suddenly desperate to know what part of Kakashi wanted to live, and how he could help ensure that it remained victorious over the nin’s will-power.

“Sure…”

Silence fell between them a moment as Kakashi stood to refill their plates, only to realize he’d already devoured everything with their first helpings. He announced with keen airs that he’d go order some more, and for the first time, Kinoe noticed the tear in fabric of his guide’s confident facade. Alone with Fishcake, Kinoe sipped on steaming tea and poured over each idea in this mind for who this young, charming, distant, shinobi orphan could actually be beneath the mask.

“I got us a different entree this time. I hope that’s okay. Gyudon.”

Smiling half-heartedly, Kinoe nodded.

“Sounds good.”

Kakashi returned the smile, calmness resettling between his shoulders, and he served Kinoe another heaping helping. As he began to serve himself however, he allowed the release of an inquiry that had been chaffing against his concern since the early afternoon.

“So, those marks on your veins… they’re from Lord Orochimaru?”

“Oh...” Kinoe tensed, gripping a hand over the crook of his scarred and bruised arm. “Yes. He takes samples every night. Different kinds from different places on my body.”

Kakashi hummed in displeased understanding, sitting back down with his newly refilled plate.

“Lord Orochimaru performs experiments on you to try and develop this ‘cure’ for you, then?”

Kinoe scowled, clarifying defensively, “They aren’t experiments. He takes samples and runs tests with those to try and develop a medicine or something.”

“He thinks the illness is in your DNA?” Kakashi pressed, idly playing with the beef on his plate.

“I don’t know, I guess?” Kinoe retorted as annoyance and embarrassment stirred a heat through his chest. “He’s the one that’s done all the studying about it. I just…”

“Wait around in a tower?”

Kakashi finally glanced up to meet Kinoe’s disgruntled glare.

“I’m kept safe and well in the tower.”

“You’re held prisoner there.”

“I’m _ill_ ,” the brunette emphasized. “And the world is too dangerous for me.”

“I don’t know,” Kakashi shrugged, playing casually through the seriousness of his argument. “You’ve been out in the world for a while now, and I have to say, one tiny flare up after all this excitement, travel, and athletic contest seems like you’d fair pretty well out here in the big dangerous world.”

The nin scooped in a large bite of rice.

“Don’t you think so, too?”

Confounded, Kinoe bit back after a groan, “Why are you doing this again?”

“It’s the whole reason we’re even making this trip, Kinoe,” Kakashi explained simply. “I want to show you the truth.”

“Well, what if your side of the truth is wrong?”

Exhaling rather defeatedly, Kakashi lowered his plate and chopsticks, cocking his head and petitioning, “You’re still holding so tightly to this idea that he truly loves you like a father should? Even after you’ve seen so many holes poked in the reality he created for you?”

Kinoe swallowed, a vulnerability wrapping around him, squeezing him tighter than any flare-up, than any moment sharing promised secrets with this stranger - the vulnerability that his entire life might be a lie. He knew it wasn’t true. Despite the signs, and the evidence stacked against his father thus far, the teen couldn’t accept these persisting, intrusive warnings that he’d been living in a reality that’d been wholly fabricated, a falsehood designed out of manipulation and abuse. No, none of it could be true. An explanation had yet to reveal itself through the mud, and it would soon come, bringing everything into clarity. It had to.

“Sometimes we lie for the greater good. I believe he’s trying to protect me.” Kinoe condended. “You asked your friends to lie about my mokuton.”

“That’s different.”

“How? Because you know why the lie is being told?”

Kakashi opened his mouth, interrupted before he could fire back.

“I believe in my father. He may not be the gentlest, or the most understanding... and I’m willing to admit that there’s likely been quite a bit of deceit from him to me... and that’s really hard to process... but, he’s still my father. I trust him.”

Mouth closing, Kakashi’s eyes fell, a great, pity-laden grief darkening his gaze.

He blinked a bit, and shook his head slightly.

“I’m going to do some reading. You should get some more sleep… We'll need you fully rested for tomorrow if we're going to finish our journey and catch the floating lanterns at the close of the festival.”

Kinoe’s eyes grew, the nin again throwing his expectations for a curveball.

“I- we’re, what? We’re going- you’re going to take me to see the floating lanterns?”

“I’m your escort, aren’t I?” Kakashi responded, the curl of his teasing smirk returning. “Then get some sleep, Majesty of The Sound Village.”

For a brief moment, Kinoe’s heart, even its confusion, swelled, warm and elated, only then to be re-alerted of his guide’s unyielding stubbornness when a yawn escaped behind mask cover.

“Okay, wait-no, Kakashi, you have to sleep.”

“I’m fit as a fiddle.”

Kinoe shot a skeptical glare.

“Truly, I’m feeling more refreshed than I have this whole mission,” the shinobi went on. “Plus, I’m anxious to read some, I haven’t been able to as much as I like lately.”

Kakashi pulled his little worn, orange book from his back satchel, giving it a slight wave through the air as if evidence for his argument against sleep.

“What are you reading, anyway? Some kind of shinobi tactical manuals?”

Nearly choking on his last bite of gyudon, Kakashi wiped a short laugh from his lips and mumbled, “Uh, yah, something like that…”

The brunette swallowed the his last bite as well, noting with the wave of his chopsticks, “Father has a lot of those back at the tower.”

Kakashi’s amusement only grew, whispering under his breath, “Yah, somehow, I doubt he has this series…”

The shinobi stood, stretching his back and collecting Kinoe and Fishcake’s plates to put with his on their food service cart.

“Do you need anything before you tuck in?”

Fishcake nuzzled in for an ear scratch as his master replied resentfully, “I need you to take a nap or something.”

“I told you, I’m-"

“Fine?” Kinoe checked. “Yah, you say that a lot.“

“And it’s true,” the nin smiled, settling back in his corner and cracking open his book.

Kinoe climbed out of bed, slow and steady, sighing, and exhausted with these futile arguments, and announcing, “I’m going to go wash off.”

Soaked under the stream of hot shower water, the brunette tried not to let his mind think. There was too much to sort through, too much to feel, and all of it in vicious combat.

Instead, he tried to focus solely on the water wetting his body, and smooth suds of lavender lather over tender skin.

He likely stayed in longer than a person should. But, without his father to pull him out for wasting water, Kinoe couldn’t resist. It wasn’t until about a half hour later, he emerged,  steam trailing out of the bathroom with him,

“Hey, Kakashi, do you know what this is? My arms are pink about half way down. It’s weird. It’s like, a clear cut off point at my shirt sleeves. I’ve never had any symptoms like this, and it only hurts a little when I...”

Kinoe trailed off having looked up and noticed the state of his guide.

“Were you sleeping?”

“No, I was reading.”

“With your eye closed?”

Kakashi rubbed the back of his neck.

“Yes?”

“That’s it,” Kinoe declared, pointing definitively to their bed. “Get in. Now.”

“Kinoe...” the nin groaned, pulling to his feet.

“Uh-uh, no. No more debate. You’re going to sleep for a bit, and that’s the end of it.”

“Eesh, rather bossy of you, princess...”

Kinoe refused to crack even a slight grin at Kakashi’s teasing. This not sleeping business had gone on needlessly for long enough.

“What were you saying about your arms?” Kakashi asked in an effort to cool down the teen’s will power. “Let me see.”

He drew in close, taking a hold over one of Kinoe’s outstretched arms, and tracing his touch over the pink skin.

“Oh, it looks like it’s just a sunburn...”

Kinoe looked up blankly, blinking expectantly.

“You know, a sunburn… Oh...”

Kakashi’s thumb gave a soft stroke across the brunette’s wrist, explaining gently, “Spending too much time in the sun can be bad for your skin. This isn’t a bad burn at all. Nothing to worry about. Your skin is probably just a little extra sensitive to it from... Here.”

Reaching into a small satchel on his hip, the shinobi pulled out a small tube filled with clear, goopy-looking liquid.

“This is aloe, should clear it up by morning.”

“Thanks…”

Kinoe accepted the tube in-hand, a small part of him disappointed when Kakashi’s touch released his arm. He gave his head a slight shake, tightening his grip on the aloe, and ordered, “Now get in bed.”

The nin’s mouth was immediately opened to in protest, cut off before it could spout more obnoxious word-play.

“Kakashi, please. For once, could you stop being such an inflexible, stubborn _ass_?”

Recoiling, Kakashi felt his cheeks warm beneath his mask, a smile spreading through a feigned offended look.

“Princess... such language.” He teased. “Fine, I’ll take a short nap. But only because you said ‘ass.’”

After shared, soft snickers, a “thank you” from Kinoe, and a few minutes more of stalling from the world’s most hard-headed ninja, Kakashi held to his word, laying down on top of the bedsheets, fully clothed, shoes, weapons, and all, and closed his eyes.

“I can feel you staring, you know?”

“Oh, right, sorry…”

Kinoe looked to Fishcake, who scowled sharply at his master, having lost the place he’d cozied up in between pillow and comforter. The teen offered a silent apology to his feline, kneeling down and meeting surly brown eyes.

Exhaling, Kinoe looked around the room for something to busy himself with. He was certainly no stranger to making time pass through listless boredom, but he normally had plenty of resources in the tower. Really, this had been a horrible idea for trying to keep himself from thinking.

Taking another look around the room, Kinoe’s eyes landed on the bright orange binding of Kakashi’s book. Perfect.

The teen quickly snatched up the novel and cracked open the pages, eager to dig in to what kind of tactics a true, elite shinobi captain would study so rigorously.

Shock and embarrassment came before disappointment ever would, flushing Kinoe’s cheeks and chest, warming his body and bubbling nervous laughter to challenge the silence.

This book was no shinobi tactical manual. This was a pornographic romance novel.

Kinoe shot wide eyes to the tabby curled in his lap, desperate to share this absurd, uncomfortable discovery. His already red face turned nearly purple at the sight of explicit words and actions written out in black and white.

Kakashi was right, his father _certainly_ didn’t have this series in his collection. How time might have passed in the tower if he had…

A slightly louder exhale slipped from Kakashi, the buzzed beginning of what could have grown into a dull snore. He’d finally fallen asleep. Good.

Kinoe smiled, mentally adding - _you closet pervert._

A few moments of internal conflict longer, and Kinoe flipped to the front of the novel, beginning his own read-through.

He was immediately frustrated to find that he quite enjoyed it. This kind of thing was supposed to be stupid. His father had been sure to impress upon him the unrealistic, and impractical idea of gushy romance. Real life, people couldn’t just marry or live for love. He wasn’t sure that his father had even ever loved his mother, the way he talked about her. People married for security, and practicality. Sex brought new life into the world, any pleasure or desire was simply nature’s way of encouraging the continuation of life. Sure, companionship was real, perhaps even romantic connections, like Asuma and Kurenai - but this fevered, wild, magnetic, life-altering, rush of love - that could only be fairy tale.

Still, reading on, Kinoe found himself gripping the pages harder, turning through them faster, his heart-rate climbing as the novel's young, pining pair brushed hands for the first time. What was this intoxication he felt for characters that weren’t even real? How, so suddenly, did it matter that they end up together? Why couldn’t he stop wanting them to kiss? How had they not kissed yet?

He tore through the third chapter, ravenously beginning to devour the fourth, when a slight, pained whimpering shattered his focus, snapping him to his feet, the novel tossed aside in embarrassment.

The whimper came again, this time, with a twitch from Kakashi’s neck and face from on the bed.

He was dreaming, and from the looks of it, something terribly unpleasant.

Fishcake hopped up atop the covers, peering over the restless nin.

A pained gasp broke out from behind black spandex, and Kakashi’s expression contorted, head shaking as sweat began to soak his skin.

“No… please…” He mumbled, his hands balling into fists, breaths exploding out in gasps. “Rin... I’m sorry… Rin… please…”

Kinoe’s hand hovered over the suffering shinobi.

“I’m so sorry… _Rin_ … I’m sorry…”

He could no longer take it, Kakashi was in anguish. Laying his hand delicately on the man’s heaving chest, Kinoe whispered, “Kakashi?”

In an instant, the shinobi gasped awake, sprung off of the bed in a tumble and threw himself into the bathroom, shaking hands yanking away his gloves, twisting the sink on full blast and plunging beneath the stream.

“Shit… come off! Come _off_ … _Please_ , come off…”

Kinoe drew in quickly after, panic overwhelming him at the sight.

“Hey, what’s wrong? It was just a dream. It’s alright.”

Kakashi stayed lost in his hysteria, water splattering over him and the entirety of the bathroom as he washed red and raw hands, his pleadings becoming more desperate, intermingled with frantic tears.

“Kakashi, hey-" Kinoe pleaded, coming in closer, reaching out a hand and tugging against the nin’s shoulder. “Kakashi, listen-"

Immediately, Kinoe was silenced by a shove to the floor as Kakashi whipped around, his expression mortifying and murderous, arm exploding into a blue crackle of lighting.

“It’s _me_! It’s Kinoe! It’s alright!”

The shinobi heard nothing but the screaming through his ears as he raised his charged arm.

In a flash of orange, Fishcake leapt between his master and the lightning blade, claws striking across the nin’s cheek, ripping mask and flesh, breaking the spell and bringing Kakashi back into reality.

“Kakashi! It’s alright. It’s me… It’s Kinoe…”

The last of blue electric tendrils dissipated as the world spun around Kakashi.

"You were having a… a night mare…”

The shinobi fell to his knees, Fishcake arching up and hissing over his master’s crumpled body.

“Kinoe…”

“Yes, it’s me. It’s okay. It was a nightmare.”

The water continued to rush in the sink behind them, silent tears spilling over Kakashi’s cheeks.

“Kinoe, I’m so sorry… I-I…”

He reached a hand over his exposed and bleeding cheek.

“You have to get away from me.”

“No, Kakashi, everything’s okay now.”

“It’s not safe!”

Kinoe jumped at the shrill outburst, shrinking back as Kakashi began the furious shake of his head, blubbering as he retreated backward.

“I’m not safe… I almost… _Shit_ …”

Stroking a hand over Fishcake, Kinoe moved his companion aside, and standing to meet the distraught man in front of him.

“I’ll get you another guard, another guide. I can’t-"

“Kakashi, listen to me,” the brunette coaxed, raising his hands, closing in cautiously despite the nin retreating further, avoiding eye contact, terror flashing from his tear clouded eye.

“Shh… it’s alright. It’s okay, now. You’re safe. I’m safe. Breathe.”

“I can’t-you can’t-I-"

“Breathe-“ Kinoe insisted futilely. There had to be a way to cut through the noise, to break through the chaos and bring some calm.

“I’m dangerous. It won’t wash off. It won’t stop. I can’t make it stop.”

“Take off your armor plating,” Kinoe ordered suddenly, Kakashi at last snapping forward and offering eye-contact.

“I- _what_?”

“Take it off.”

“Kinoe-"

“ _Now_.”

Taken aback, and still quite disturbed, Kakashi obeyed, snapping off the buckles at his shoulders and waist, and wrestling the excess away, down to his black, athletic tank. Kinoe stepped forward, nerves igniting between them as the teen boldly pressed his palm against Kakashi’s thundering chest.

“You’re right here.”

A single sob burst from the nin, gaze fighting to leave again.

“Give me your hand?”

Kakashi ground his teeth, forcing himself to turn back and grant Kinoe his simple request. The hand was shaking violently, soaked from the sink, but also worn and cracked, reddened and wounded by far more than kunai and combat, having been stripped and drown a thousand times over in the dead of night. As if handling a newborn bird, Kinoe slowly cupped his unoccupied hand under Kakashi’s, never mind that it had just been lit with lightning to strike and kill, and set it over his own racing heart.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Kinoe assured, a slight smile lighting his lips in the dark. “I’m right here with you. Breathe.”

Kakashi swallowed hard, his wavering breaths fighting to settle down and match the steady rise and fall of his hand against the warm chest beneath it.

“See, it’s alright. It was just a nightmare.”

Closing his open palm into a fist over Kinoe’s heart, Kakashi grimaced, admitting in a broken whisper, “But, it wasn’t…”

Briefly, Kinoe’s eyes fell, not wanting to know what horror haunted the mind of a boy turned killer from childhood.

“This is why you refused sleep,” the teen stated plainly. “You knew you’d wake at the whiff of danger. You were staying awake to protect yourself from your subconscious.”

A string of panicked garble came gushing out of the nin in response. He didn’t want to burden Kinoe this way. He’s always able to stay awake when he’s on missions with others. He never wanted to hurt Kinoe. He never wanted to scare him. He just wanted it to stop. Why didn’t it ever stop? He couldn’t close his eyes.

“Hey, just breathe. It’s alright,” Kinoe soothed again, drawing in a step closer and giving deeper breaths for Kakashi to feel and mimic. “There. We’re right here.”

Kinoe waited for the heart under his touch to ease its bedlam before catching the mourning eyes of his guide and asking softly, “Would you like to sit down? I can get you some water?”

With a nod, Kakashi slowly sat on the edge of their bed, rigid and weighted. He looked shamefully to Fishcake, still tense, orange hair standing on end.

“I’m very sorry Fishcake... Please forgive me…”

Kinoe returned, having drawn a glass of water, and shut off the raging faucet.

“It’s alright,” he affirmed, handing over the glass and picking up his beloved pet to cuddle him close. “I have nightmares as well. He’s always by my side when I wake.”

“I almost hurt you.”

“But you didn’t.”

Kakashi extended a hand toward Fishcake, not quite reaching the feline.

“Thank you for stopping me, for keeping him safe...”

Tentatively, after a look to his master, Fishcake extended his neck forward to meet Kakashi’s touch, Kinoe then offering the tabby into the shinobi’s lap.

“Here.”

Extremely tense and hesitant, Kakashi accepted, startled at how much it warmed his heart when the soft, pink pads of a paw over were placed where they’d scratched just moments before. The shinobi let a final tear slip as he stared into Fishcake’s large, forgiving, brown eyes. Perhaps cats weren’t so bad.

Kneeling at the bedside, Kinoe gave a slight smile, stroking his hand over his pet and looking up to more of Kakashi’s face then he’d seen before. He wondered briefly how many others had seen this much beneath the mask, if anyone.

“We should get some antiseptic on that. And you should drink your water.”

Kakashi nodded, opening his arms to allow Fishcake to hop down to his master, and standing to cross back to his discarded armor and satchels. He dug for a moment before pulling out a small tube of antiseptic gel, and another of skin sealant. Finding a spare, masked tank in another bag, the nin, his back to Kinoe, pulled his shirt overhead, tossing it away.

Kinoe’s mouth opened with a silent stammer, body instantaneously in a burn. The brief viewing of Kakashi’s bare back, muscled, marked and sweat slick, cut away quickly as Kakashi stood, pulling his clean shirt over-head. His mask remained down, however, for a moment longer as the shinobi slapped a quick dabs of salve over his scratched cheek before tucking away under cover again.

Remembering to take his next breath, Kinoe decided to take a leap further into this opportune exposure.

“Who is Rin?”

Kakashi didn’t move. Instead, the most defeated, longing, lost whisper floated out from over a heavy shoulder.

“She was my old teammate... “

“She... she’s dead…?”

Kakashi nodded.

“I see... I’m sorry…”

“Both of my childhood teammates died…” The shinobi continued, unprompted, eye directed to the floor, but his gaze staring far beyond reach and reality. “And our sensei…”

The confession pierced through Kinoe’s chest.

“Kakashi...”

“It’s the life of a shinobi...”

Tense air grew thick between them, the great expanse of words that would never be enough, of understanding that couldn’t ever fully be gripped. Shame melted over Kinoe's heated skin. How carelessly he'd initially thought this man to be heartless, to think nothing of the lives of others. No matter what other shinobi might be, Kakashi’s broken heart fought in righteous intent, of this Kinoe was positive now.

“Why not leave The Village?” The teen asked, when he could bare the silence of grief no longer. “Lead a civilian life? Move away from all the fighting and death?”

Finally, the nin turned over his shoulder, burning the earnesty of his being into Kinoe.

“Because of people like you. As long as there are people in need, I cannot walk away. My teammates, my Sensei, they all died defending the Village. I will do the same.”

Kinoe swallowed, finding a tear of his own had slipped down his cheek without his knowing it.

“You should sleep,” Kakashi instructed. “It’s a lost cause for me tonight.”

“I-hey… Please, try and sleep a little longer. You’re still exhausted, if not more so now.”

The shinobi shook his head.

“I don’t... want to see her again…”

Kinoe pushed himself forward, coming around to face his tortured guide, staring up with hope-glossed eyes, and giving a light squeeze over the broken skin of Kakashi’s fingers.

“You’re not going to.”

“Kinoe, please... don’t…”

“Lay down. It’s going to be alright,” he promised instead, refusing to let the shinobi’s hand slip from his grasp. I’m right here with you. The worst has passed.”

“I will try, for you,” Kakashi agreed, turning away. “But, you set your hopes too high…”

It took the nin a few more minutes stalling before he crawled back into bed. This time, Kinoe forced him to actually make himself comfortable. The brunette demanded the continued removal of Kakashi’s armor plating and gloves, as well as the additional removal of to pull his leg satchels. He allowed only the tanto on the man’s back to remain.

Once reluctantly tucked between their sheets, Kakashi tried to shake off any remaining panic through his veins, and surrender to the heaviness that pulled his body into the black.

At least half hour passed before even a light sleep found the him, Kinoe desperately trying to keep himself from staring. But, not twenty minutes after slumber set over the shinobi, did a soft sheen of sweat begin to shine over his skin, along with an angry twitch through his body, and a suffering moan make repeated escape through labored breathing.

Kinoe didn’t let a second go wasted this time, much to Fishcake’s disapproval. He climbed up on the bedside, placing a hand back over Kakashi’s frantic chest, calling him awake, bracing for the explosion that was sure to follow.

Kakashi’s eye shot open, his body snapping erect with a gasp.

“It’s okay. You’re awake. It’s over. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Breaths still heaving, eye wild, the nin gripped his own hand over the one pressed to his chest, squeezing his knuckles white.

“Kinoe...”

He scooted closer, assuring, “Yes, it’s me. I’m here.”

A strained whine through his throat, Kakashi fell back into his pillow, hand still tight over Kinoe’s, the other reaching up to rest back over the teen’s heartbeat once more.

“It was you this time... I had... you were dead in my arms...”

Fishcake jumped up on the foot of the bed.

“So this one was truly just a nightmare. Not real. I’m here. I’m safe and fine. So are you.”

Eye squinting tight as the nin shook his head, Kakashi fought for the image to leave from its imprint in his mind.

“Stay up here with me, please?”

“Of course.”

Kakashi turned an open eye to Kinoe, as if to ask him if he were sure, suddenly afraid he’d crossed a line. Kinoe simply grinned back through the dark, whispering, “You don’t have to be afraid to be vulnerable with me, either, you know?”

Moved, Kakashi offered a weak hum of acceptance.

“I can-um, I can get out from under the covers, if-if you would like under the covers, so that we don’t, so that you can have-"

“No, it’s okay. I mean, I don’t mind, if you-"

“I don’t mind.”

They both grinned this time, and slowly, their touch over each other’s chests fell, and Kakashi lifted the blankets for Kinoe to crawl under with him.

A tense beat passed, thick with a thousand feelings over a spectrum of emotion. Fear. Confusion. Curiosity. Thrill. Excitement. All of it charging the air, as the pair voyaged out, truly, for as long as either of them could remember, into the intimacy of a relationship.

The lock of their gaze was broken, however, as Fishcake very decidedly strut from his corner, resting on the edge of the bed, up between his master and the silver-haired man in bed with him. He took extra time to fluff around some of the sheets between the pair’s waists, before circling several times, nose high in the air, and curling in to sleep with one brown eye searing into Kakashi.

Kinoe bit back his lips to contain a laugh, touched at the protective guard of his dearest companion. Kakashi, on the other hand, remembered the sting through his slashed cheek and gave a respectful nod to the feline.

“Sleep,” Kinoe cooed, looking back to Kakashi. “It’ll be alright.”

The nin nodded, doubt clouding his conviction.

“Hey… do you want… I mean, if you want to keep your hand over my shoulder or chest to follow the rate of my breathing, you can. Not that you have to at all. I just-it seemed like it calmed you, and so, I didn’t want you to feel like you couldn’t anymore, if-if you wanted to…”

Without a word, the shinobi’s hand wriggled up through the covers and found its way back onto Kinoe’s heartbeat. Then, his eye closed and shaking stilled.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “You can sleep too, if you’d like, You were right about my waking at a whiff of danger. We’re safe here.”

At this, Kinoe could not help himself, and intertwined his touch atop Kakashi’s, as he answered in full, confident conviction.

“Yes, we are…”


	6. Chapter 6

“Big brother…”

“Big brother wake up!”

Kinoe’s tired eyes opened to try and focus on Kakashi, in bed across from him, visible eye wide and blank.

“Kakashi?”

The mouth behind his mask moved, but the voice of of a young girl floated out instead.

“Big brother! You’re awake!”

Squeezing his eyes shut, Kinoe shook his head in an attempt to sort out the whatever malfunction was happening in his sleepiness.

When his eyes reopened, Kakashi was gone altogether, and in his place, the tiny, freckle-faced young girl that often frequented his night terrors.

“It’s you… How did you get here?”

The girl smiled.

“Brother, it’s not me that’s here. It’s you that is almost here.”

A sweat started to mist over Kinoe’s skin, his throat running dry.

“What? I don’t understand…”

She giggled, assuring, “You will soon. You’re so close to finding us…”

Kinoe closed his eyes again, stumbling in confusion, “Where’s Kakashi? What’s going on?”

This time, when his eyes opened, the girl was gone, replaced by the cold, white body of his father, yellow glare gleaming into his son as his slithering grip tightened around Kinoe’s neck.

Kinoe wheezed for oxygen, paralyzed by pain and panic.

He’d been found. His father had found him.

Mixed with the bone-chilling rasp of his father’s threat, the little girl’s sweet detached voice echoed as a promised reassurance that rattled the walls.

“You’re almost home…”

Kinoe jolted awake, sweaty and disoriented, alone in bed.

A dream?

Blinking in the morning, he snapped up to see Fishcake perched in the window seal, sitting across Kakashi, cleaning the scraps of the nin’s breakfast from his plate. Their silhouettes glowed against dawn’s gentle light as it poured in and illuminated such precious reality.

Yes, only a dream…

“Good morning!”

Kinoe smiled, rubbing his eyes of clean of his unsettling dream, and yawning his own “good morning” back.

“I hope you’ll forgive that we’ve already eaten. But, I do have a surprise for you, birthday boy.”

Eyebrows raising, Kinoe sat forward. Fishcake leapt down and over to his master’s lap as Kakashi lifted a cover from an overstuffed tray of breakfast items, complete with a piled plate of sticky, sugary pastries.

“This is all for me?” Kinoe gaped.

The nin hummed in affirmation, rolling the service cart over, and beginning to serve the overwhelmed brunette breakfast in bed.

“I wasn’t sure if you were lying about it being your birthday this morning to get the inn keeper off my back, or if it really is your birthday. But, I thought, either way, it could be fun to celebrate it.”

Having gotten Kinoe settled, Kakashi sat on the foot of their bed.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t sure if you were more of a sweet, or savory kind of guy, so I just got a little of everything. I hope at least some of it is to your liking.”

“I-I don’t know what to say...” Kinoe whispered. “Thank you... very much. It’s perfect. And it is, my birthday, I mean. I wasn’t just saying it for the lady...”

Kakashi smiled beneath his mask.

“You’re welcome. Now, eat. We’ve got to get a move on for the day. Lots to see and do. You’re still wanting to go to the Memorial Festival?”

Nodding eagerly, Kinoe reached for a pastry, inhaling deep and letting his mouth fill in anticipation before biting through puffy, glazed, doughy goodness. He couldn’t help the audible reaction that rumbled up through his throat at the taste.

“I’m assuming I picked correctly,” Kakashi teased. “You’re a sweets guy then?”

“I guess so. This would be the first that I can remember,” Kinoe answered, licking a finger and meeting Kakashi’s wide eye. “Father says they have no nutritional value, and will rot my teeth and insides.”

The brunette snatched up another, biting in happily, before asking from a full mouth. “Would you like one? You got me more than I could ever finish.”

The nin shook his head, pained grin between his lips.

“Nah, I’m not much one for sweets. Just not quite my taste. I am very, very glad you are enjoying them though. There will be plenty more of the sort down at the festival, and if this is your first go-round with sweets, and since it is your actual birthday, I’ll be finding you some cake at some point, too.”

Kinoe found himself caught between shrinking away under such over-indulgent pampering, and swelling up with emotion. The more he looked on Kakashi, the more he was torn in two. Why couldn’t he have known this man, this kind of bright, delicious, adventurous life without also having to know what truth might lay ahead about his father? Why couldn’t he accept one without the other? Why couldn’t the day consist of the Memorial Festival, and decedent sweets, and this stubborn, snarky, beautiful, battle-worn shinobi that looked after him with such lavish care? He wished his life could split fully. That he could know and love the safety, and security of the reality his father had built for him, the life he’d always known to be true, and this new life that shone with such alluring radiance, despite the simultaneous raging alarms of his father’s words through his head.

The brunette swallowed down another pastry. Never mind his teeth and insides, they were too good not to be tasted for the time being.

Kakashi beamed in his quiet, subtle way, to see his surprise being so throroughtly enjoyed. He stroked a hand over Fishcake, breaking the silence.

“So, how’d you like Make Out Paradise?”

Kinoe coughed on a mouthful of pastry, falling quickly apart into a stuttering, red-faced mess.

“You can relax, Kinoe,” Kakashi chuckled lightly. “The last person that is going to cast any judgement is me. It’s _my_ book. I literally have read the series on repeat for years. In public. All the time. I just needed to give you a hard time.”

“I _thought_ it was a shinobi tactical manual,” Kinoe defended.

“Right, but when you realized it wasn’t, how many chapters did you get through?”

Looking down into his breakfast tray, Kinoe murmured under his breath, “Three… You woke up as I started the fourth…”

“It’s good, right?” Kakashi grinned. “You’re welcome to read more whenever you’d like. We can start a book club.”

“We could call it ‘Shameless Perverts Reading Ridiculous Romance.’”

The pair shared an exhaled snicker, Kinoe then catching the shinobi’s gaze and deviating briefly light jesting.

“Hey, last night... are you feeling better?”

The nin nodded, shaking his head as if almost in slight disbelief.

“I slept better with your aid than I have in a very, very long time… I am doing much better, truly… Thank you…”

Fishcake glanced between his master and the shinobi a few times, neither of them noticing, both smiling silent, stomachs a-flutter.

“Well, uh,” Kakashi cleared his throat. “Enjoy the rest of your breakfast. We’ll need to get going soon.”

A little over a half an hour later, the pair and Fishcake made their way down from their room, past the unforgiving glare of the innkeeper, and out into the busy morning city streets.

Even the second time, and having stayed the night in the Village, it still robbed Kinoe of his breath to see so many people bustling about, talking, rushing, eating, shopping, living.

It was incredible, almost terrifying, to know that this whole world of people had all been existing so fully outside his tower all this time.

Effortlessly and at complete ease, Kakashi moved them through the streets and out toward a sea of tents, vendors sewn together by strings of colorful paper lanterns. The Memorial Festival continued to unfold as they drew closer, filled with a myriad of smells, sights, and sounds, all rich and vibrant, all enough to make Kinoe check again to make sure that this too hadn’t been a dream.

“Well, what would you like to do first?” Kakashi asked.

“There’s so much… I don’t know where to even look, much less where to start…”

Kinoe pet a reassuring hand over Fishcake as the feline had jumped up and onto his shoulder with a bit of his own nerves.

“Most people are dressed in yukata. Should we be as well?”

Kakashi shrugged, explaining that it was more tradition and spirit of it all that had most of the festival-goers decked out in their yukata, but that there certainly wasn’t any requirement to dress out in order to attend.

“Would you like to get one to wear?”

“You don’t wear one, do you?”

“No, but that’s not what I asked.”

Kinoe bit his lip, stammering, “Oh, no, I couldn't... Too much trouble. I don't need one.”

As if he were accepting this answer, the nin turned and called Kinoe along, into the festival, though it was only to lead the brunette to the first clothing stand he could find, where immediately alerted the shop’s attended that they’d need a dressing room started.

After much protest, Kinoe allowed himself to paw through the lovely traditional linens and make a few selections to try on for size. He didn’t make it past the first one. As soon as the attendant finished tying his bow of his obi, Kinoe’s heart was set.

“You like it?” Kakashi called from outside the curtain, shifting from foot to foot as he and Fishcake received a crooked, knowing smile from the attendant as she slipped out.

“I still think it’s too much for me…”

Kinoe drew back the cover of his dressing room, revealing the yukata adoring his slender frame. Pastel yellow linens crossed over his bare chest, embroidered with a delicate trail of flowers, leaves, and twisting vines along the hems. The brunette drew his attention from the voluminous bow tied perfectly against his low back, to meet the wide, stunned eye of his guide.

“It’s beautiful, but, it’s too much-"

“No, it’s not-it’s… you’re beautiful- handsome - I - not that you weren’t before - this is just… _Wow_ …” Kakashi rubbed a hand against the back of his neck, something like a nervous singular laugh exhaling out of him, the nin extremely grateful for the cover of his mask in this moment. He cleared his throat. “I like it very much.”

Kinoe nearly melted there in the dressing stall, the pink blush of his skin serving as a complement to his new ensemble. Kakashi ensured he wore it out of the stand.

“So, where to next?”

Frowning, Kinoe looked to his feet, a new, sour guilt twisting through his stomach after seeing the price tag on his new clothes.

“Why are you doing all this for me? I certainly don’t deserve it,” he murmured.

“It’s your birthday. I want to. A lot of reasons,” The shinobi offered.

“Kakashi…”

They stopped their stroll, the rest of the festival continuing to move around them.

“Because I know there’s been pain in your life up until today, and I know there’s likely a great deal more pain to come soon,” Kakashi stated plain and somber. He lifted his hand slightly, allowing it to hang just in front of Kinoe’s, a breath from brushing it. “I want a few moments of your life to be free and lovely and carefree…”

Looking out over the busy, chattering villagers the nin continued, “This festival was started after the war… So many children had gone off and fought and died… There was a change in Hokage - my sensei… Having lost two of his own students, he began to put forth efforts to preserve and protect children that aspired to become shinobi. Part of those efforts gave birth to the Memorial Festival. It is a time each year, set aside to remember children that never had the chance to be children because they inherited the wars waged between adults. The festival is designed for attendees to participate in all manner of child-like things. Games. Desserts. Contests. All kinds of toys and trinkets. And at the end, the floating lanterns are released to represent each child lost, and to celebrate the brief beauty of their lives…”

The streets seemed to have fallen silent, Kinoe completely captured in the black and white scene drawn out before him.

“This festival is for you, Kinoe.”

Trembling knuckles skimmed lightly over the back of the brunette’s.

“Let yourself have a little reprieve. Let yourself have the childhood you spent locked in a tower. You do deserve it…”

“Kakashi,” Kinoe breathed, giving a slight shake to his head. “Today is for you, too.”

“I survived the war, remember?”

“Then act like it.”

With that, Kinoe took Kakashi’s hand, a smile between his lips, and pulled the pair of them back into the festival streets to paint the black and white with vibrant color.

They started simply trailing from stall to stall, pouring over the many handmade goods for purchase, inhaling the sweet scents of candles, soaps and lotions, sampling tastes from food stands along the way. Weaving through the festival, both men began to relax further and further, losing themselves in simple thrills, in the everyday delights, in each other’s company, until eventually, they were no longer carried over their shoulders the weight of the world, nor the fear of what the future were to hold. Instead, they were simply young adults, celebrating a birthday, sharing glances and fleeting, electric touches, soaking in as treasures what basic freedoms of living came so easily and abundantly for the mass majority of people.

As the morning rose into the afternoon, Kakashi made good on his promise to find some kind of birthday cake, and presented Kinoe with the biggest cupcake they could find. The caramel cream filling nearly sent the teen over his edge, leaving him repeatedly gushing in wonder at how the dessert could be so rich and so fluffy at the same time. It wasn’t until Kakashi’s thumb swiped a lingering dab of frosting from his bottom lip that his words ran dry. Though his mouth stayed hidden away through trickery of jutsu, Kinoe watched wide-eyed as the frosting disappeared into the black illusion and was sucked clean in Kakashi’s mouth.

“I, um, I thought you weren’t much for sweets…”

The shinobi glanced away, no amount of jutsu or mask able to conceal the pink warmth spreading out over his shoulders.

“I’m not… Just wanted a taste…”

Fishcake’s stunned, uncomfortable gaze flicked again between his master and the silver-haired man. The feline struggled a moment in their thick silence, trying to deicide whether or not he wanted to rake his claws again through the nin’s cheek, or if he was starting to feel his own excited butterflies at this bold development.

“So, then, um, what would you like to do next?”

Kinoe shook his head of the image that popped immediately into mind, searching desperately over his surroundings for something to catch his eye and offer a suggestion other than his current giggled stammer.

“We could go, go get a lantern for later tonight,” he suggested, his sight finally locking onto something of interest and pulling his attention back into reality. “Or, what’s that over there? Some kind of vigil?”

“Oh, that’s… I wasn’t really going to bring that up,” Kakashi started, his tone shifting. “I didn’t want to make you feel like I was trying to use it against you or something like that…”

Craning his neck, Kinoe strained for a better look.

“What is it?”

Kakashi sighed, hand disappearing to rub behind his neck.

“It’s a part of the Memorial Festival that came about as time went on, and the event started to evolve. While the festival started as a way to honor children that had to serve as shinobi during the war, people began using it to remember, honor, and grieve the loss of children that… well, that have gone missing or been casualties because of rogue shinobi, or disputes between the nations… That spot over there is where people place photos of their lost loved ones, leave flowers, light candles in their remembrance, and offer prayers that one day their missing children might somehow find their way back home.”

“This started because of what the villagers think my father has done? Kidnapping innocent children, you had said…”

Kakashi nodded, adding softly, “It is also for many others. There has been much tragedy and oversight at the expense of the innocent in our past, which is a large part of why I want to fight so hard to make things better. But, yes, this tradition at the festival started from the series of kidnappings that have been linked to Lord Orochimaru…”

Kinoe’s brow smoothed out as he released his squint, turning to look up at his guide as he declared, “I want to go over and look.”  
“You’re sure?”

The teen swallowed hard, his hands taking up a sweat.

“Yes.”

Drawing closer, Kinoe began to make eye contact with more than fifty photos of children that had been left behind amongst waxy, dripping candle stumps, and fresh, aromatic bouquets. Some families had left teddy bears, dolls and blankets too, items that had clearly been beloved to those who’d now been lost over a decade. A churn of grief, shame, and very palpable disgust threatened to burst forward out of Kinoe.

This was ludicrous. So many children lost. And, admittedly, lost because of shinobi. It was vile. Horrific. And the further gaul that they would somehow conjure up the delusion that his father was to blame - it confounded Kinoe, setting his teeth on edge and igniting a rage through his tight chest.

Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Green eyes. All soft, naive, sparkling. And then - on a tiny, torn scrap, barely visible amongst the masses - a pair of all too familiar wide, almond-shaped eyes on a small, brunette boy, no more than four years old.

The festival vanished into black. The chatter around them. The other photos. The candles. Fishcake at his feet, and Kakashi over his shoulder. Gone.

There was only this tiny, torn scrap as, and the printed image, worn and faded, of the lost boy as Kinoe reached out to take it in hand.

“Kinoe…”

_“You’re so close to finding us…”_

Kinoe felt his knees knock together, having their strength drain away from underneath him. At the same time, an icy prickle started it’s way down from the top of his head, sloshing him further into dizzy darkness, creeping inward on the edges of his vision.

“Kinoe, hey…”

Kakashi’s grasp snaked around to catch his waist, and steady what would have likely been a fall from consciousness.

“I need you to take me where you were going to take me. Show me whatever evidence you were going to show me. _Now_.”

Slowly, the shinobi nodded, glancing again to the small boy in the photo before twisting the brunette in his grasp and bearing his gaze down, deep into the terrified eyes before him.

“Are you sure you want to go and see?”

Kinoe whipped his body back from Kakashi’s grasp, a snarl through his tone as he snapped, “What do you mean am I sure I want to go and see? That’s the whole reason you took me out of my tower! The whole reason we’ve been doing any of this!”

He shook his head, grip tightening on the scrap in hand and shoving it up into the nin’s face.

“Look at this, Kakashi!” He demanded. “No more playing around. What were we even _doing_? Challenges? Festivals?”

Shaking his head again, a whimper broke through his voice as he confessed, “I need _answers_ … Take me. Show me. Now. Please.”

“Follow me. We’re about thirty minutes away if we travel quickly.”

Having Fishcake hop up on his shoulder, the nin lead their small party away from the Memorial Festival, and out into a forrest on the outskirts of the Village.

They flew through the lush green, the beauty and singing of birds invisible and silent to Kinoe as he followed, unable to make his legs move fast enough, unable to process the absolute hurricane of feeling ravaging his heart and mind.

Where were they going? What possibly would come through the trees next? He’d been convinced from the moment they’d set foot outside the tower that nothing would change his mind about who his father was, about who he was, and that conviction still clung to him, though screaming and suffering in the light of exposure. It couldn’t be true. None of it could be true. Clarity had to come through the mud. This boy in the photo was not him. Could never have been him. He was Kinoe. He was Lord Orochimaru’s son. Whatever would come at the end of their path would only prove that. Would only prove Kakashi wrong. It had to.

A half hour drug Kinoe through a tumultuous eternity, and somehow, managed to pass quicker than his panted breath.

Kakashi stopped suddenly, slowing them, and turning to again need the brunette’s wild eyes.

“Kinoe, our destination is through that last patch of bushes-"

“Why are we waiting? Let’s go.”

The nin caught his arm, gently, but firmly pulling him back before the teen could break away.

“It is the small, condemned, underground town where the Iburi clan lived, and where they were massacred… I don’t know what remains down there from the attack. It was years ago, but, it may have been left as a tomb. Are-“

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure again,” Kinoe interrupted, wrenching back his arm. “I’m sure. Let’s go.”

Sighing, heavy and hurting, Kakashi relented, crossing back in front to lead.

“Let me go first in each area, and check for any traps…”

Fishcake meowed and leapt down to draw in step with his master, the feline’s concern growing when not even a glance was cast down his way.

Kinoe instead charged ahead, impatient that his guide moved so slowly and cautiously through the bushes in front of them.

As they broke through, the fragmented remains of an old well came into view.

“We’ll be traveling down,” Kakashi said. “Would you like to hang onto my back and I can-"

“No,” Kinoe spat, hastily snatching Fishcake up from the ground. “I’ll climb down myself. Just go.”

The way down was longer than Kinoe expected, and far more difficult, too. Noticing his strain and struggle, Kakashi began to quietly offer a focal point for Kinoe’s frustrated attention.

“This well was once the secret entrance to the home of the Iburi clan. The clan members were descendants of Lord Hashirama, who lived long, long ago. He was the one to end what had been an a century-long feud between the Uchiha and the Senju clan, by battling against the Uchiha’s leader and his former best friend, Uchiha Madara. Lord Hashirama then founded The Leaf Village, became the First Hokage, and led the first era of peace that the shinobi world had known.

“When Lord Hashirama died, it was his wish to be given back to his clan members, to be buried, and have his body used as organic fertilizer on which to grow a garden.”

In his mind, Kinoe saw a flash of flowers and herbs growing, rich and lush in a warm beam of sunlight breaking though a hole in the earth, illuminating the dark and allowing the growth.

“Say his name again.”

Kakashi glanced away from the dirty walls of the well and over to Kinoe.

“Lord Hashirama...”

It echoed through Kinoe’s mind.

“Go on…”

“The garden that grew from Lord Hashirama’s remains was said to produce special medicinal herbs, with extremely powerful, if not miraculous, healing properties. For protection, the Second Hokage, Lord Tobirama, had the clan move into hiding, using Earth-style shinobi to reform the terrain, and move the entirety of the Iburi clan, and their garden, underground. The Iburi clan worked diligently on their garden, sending out teas, food pills, and medicines up to the Hokage’s elite shinobi to be distributed amongst the Village and traded to the other Villages as well, without endangering the Iburi clan.”

Despite his genuine interest and curiosity, Kinoe’s nerves got the best of his action, spewing out of his mouth in a venomous interruption.

“This is a great story and all - but what does any of this have to do with me?”

“There was a reason that Lord Hashirama wanted his body to be the base of a garden. There was a reason that he wanted his clan to be the ones to tend what grew from his remains. Lord Hashirama bore no children. Many say his heart never recovered from the heartbreak of Madara’s turn on him. Many others say that he’d been in love with Madara. Looking at the history of it, I tend to believe both. Either way, Lord Hashirama wanted a way for his legacy to live on, and he hoped his garden would do just that.”

“His legacy of healing?”

Kakashi’s feet at last touched the muddy bottom of the well, and he stretched tired arms up to aid the last of Kinoe’s descent.

“No,” he clarified, a slight bittersweet smirk curving under his mask. “His legacy as the only ever possessor of the mokuton Kekkei Genkai.”

Kinoe’s eyes widened, his chest heaving.

“Only, until you,” The nin concluded. He pulled a small canteen from a satchel on his leg, offering it over to the dazed, brunette before him. “Lord Hashirama hoped that the people of his bloodline would be able to grow something to ignite wood-style abilities inside someone that had been born with water and earth-style chakra natures. For decades, there was no success to speak of... then the Iburi clan was attacked and destroyed, their garden and the grave of Lord Hashirama with it, and all hope for the Mokuton to surface again died out… And then, looking for the man believed to have killed the Iburi clan, I find you.”

Kinoe’s gaze darted away, head spinning with a vicious throb. He drew a few swallows from the canteen, handing it back almost in a shove.

“So, you think my father found and killed the Iburi clan so he could take me? Well, you’re wrong. He saved me. We barely got out alive. Everything else you’re saying might be true - but it doesn’t matter. You’re wrong about him being the culprit.”

Charging away, Kinoe made his way through the small dark tunnel before them, Kakashi calling after him to wait, Fishcake meowing in protest as he was set down and left at the shinobi’s feet.

“That’s probably why he kept me in the tower. He knew I’d be hunted for my mokuton. He wanted to keep me safe. If we were hidden before, then of course he had to hide us again.

This time no one could know. He didn’t tell me to keep me safe. He lied so I wouldn’t feel responsible for the death of my clan, or feel pressure for being the only processor to the wood-style.”

Kakashi urged Kinoe to slow down again, desperate to bring some light into the pitch dark and check the abandoned tunnels for traps or danger. He lit his hand with lightning, chasing after Kinoe as he sprinted spouting frantic explanations as he blindly forged ahead alone.

“It makes sense now. I knew it would make sense. I knew it would. If I kept following my instinct, kept trusting in my father. I knew it couldn’t be true.”

“Kinoe! Stop!”

Kakashi finally caught the teen, slapping his free hand over Kinoe’s shoulder and yanking him to a halt.

“It’s not safe! You can’t even see! You don’t know-"

“I _do_ know! I know that I’m _right_! I was _right_! I was worried for nothing! We did all of this for nothing! You could have just told me the story and it all would have made sense!” Kinoe carried on emphatically, arms shooting out in hysterical gestures. “But, no! You shinobi had to drag me down out of safety, make me doubt my father, my whole life - drop me down an old well where my clan was murdered, just to try and show me… to show me…”

In an instant, all the oxygen in the great open dark of the underground was gone, sucked up and away into suffocating silence.

The light from Kakashi’s crackling lightning blade cast a shadowy glow around the pair, illuminating, just a few feet in front of them, in a spatter of dried bloodstain, the dead and mangled bodies of about a dozen yellow-eyed, porcelain white snakes.

“Those… those are my father’s snakes…”

Kinoe grabbed onto Kakashi’s elbow, pulling his lightning blade forward to light his way as a torch.

“He must have used them to protect us from whoever was attacking us…”

After the next tug on his arm, the nin managed to pause Kinoe’s frantic exploration long enough to request a few branches grown from the teen, which he then used a bit of old fabric and a bit of his own fire-style to fashion proper torches.

Immediately, he regretted it.

Kinoe snatched his torch away and quickly left his guide and pet in the dust, squinting eyes desperate to capture every inch on which he could now shed light.

Blood painted the floors. The walls. Too many snakes to count lay dead and shriveled, becoming more dense as Kinoe moved inward. Amongst them, torn clothes, abandoned weapons, and all manner of life interrupted and swept away without warning.

This is where his people had fought and died. This is where they made their last stand.

In the back of his head, Kinoe began to hear, very faint, but very clearly, the echos of piercing screams, of guttural battle cries, of terror, loss, and defeat from memory long forgotten.

Moving in deeper, and Kakashi quick on his heels, Kinoe made for an opening in the muddy walls, discovering a corridor lined with doors. Some were opened, some closed, some blasted off their hinges. Inside, however, the makings of modest vacant homes.

The cries in Kinoe’s mind grew louder, rising up into a chaotic roar, and with it, a burn through his throat to join in their scream.

He tore down the corridor, lifting his flame to each door frame, hunting, but in the pursuit of something he still did not know yet. With each empty room, the roar in his mind amplified, ballooning into a pressure that strained against his skull. He had to find it. He had to make it stop. He had to know why the snakes were found in every last room. He had to be right. He had been right.

Then suddenly, one of the door frames struck him into stillness.

This was it.

“Kinoe?” Kakashi asked from behind, breathless. “Is this…”

The brunette moved slowly inward, crossing through concrete, vision shaking with the deafening outcry of his emerging memory. He lifted his torch, pouring over small, dusty, unmade beds, an overturned kitchen table with his plates shattered to the floor, and cupboards with cracked paint. A children’s book on the ground caught his eye, the faded reds and yellows striking a bittersweet chord in his heart. Sinking to his knees, the teen reached his trembling free hand to touch the dirty pages, when his attention caught yet again. This time, the back of a small black frame, broken open, with the frayed ends of its ripped photo jutting out in a crooked, crumpled bunch. It looked unmistakably as though someone had tried to pull the photo through, and had only made out with a scrap, leaving the rest behind, facedown and shattered in their abandoned home.

The burn through Kinoe’s throat raged all the more, so much so, that part of him began to wonder if he’d fallen into screaming aloud to try and relieve any of the agonizing pressure of the thousand wailing voices in his mind.

He handed his torch up to Kakashi, and then, with one hand, reached into his pocket to pull out the photo scrap he’d taken from the Memorial Festival, and with the other, pulled the discarded frame through the dirt and into his lap.

The images matched, and Kinoe saw his former self, just four years old, standing beside his family.

His mother was lovely. Plain, but beaming of hard work, pride and love. Beside Kinoe, holding his hand, the freckled-faced girl from his dreams, all in a wide, toothy grin. His father stood beside the three of them, tall, broad, and straight-faced. Kinoe stroked a thumb over his stern face, and sweet almond eyes.

The man was unmistakably his father, but he was also, without a doubt, not Orochimaru.

With the sight of truth in his hands, the roar ceased, Kinoe’s vision fading to white in its sudden silence, washing him with it, into memory long locked away…

 

_“Yukimi, honey, come here, hold on to your brother, baby. Everything is going to be alright…”_

_His mother, somehow calm despite the chaos that raged just outside their door, knelt to meet the terrified eyes of her children._

_“You two are so brave, you always have been, and now I need you to call upon that braveness once more, for mommy.”_

_His father drew in close, kissing each of them on the head, lingering a moment after, as if to have a silent conversation with his wife._

_“I love you all, so very much. I promise I will keep you safe.”_

_In his next breath he was gone, Yukimi calling after him though a strangled sob._

_“Papa! Come back!”_

_“Shh, it’s alright. We’ll see Papa again soon.”_

_“Your brother is right. Stay quiet, little one. Both of you, as quiet and as quick as you can, follow me.”_

_She tucked a kunai in the tiny hand of her boy._

_“Don’t hesitate. You are strong, my beloved son.”_

_Turning her attention to Yukimi, who had slipped back and was fumbling through her possessions, their mother met their hands, ordering them not to let go, or to look back, and whisked them from their home, out into the madness of massacre._

_Snakes, hundreds of them, white and hissing, swarmed the halls, snapping their fangs into the flesh of the Iburi clan. Men. Women. Children. Their bodies crumpling into the dirt, contorting in anguish as poison pumped through their veins. The stench of vomit and blood fogged the halls, every civilian in a blur of fight or flight, their piercing despair and pleas for help intermingled with desperate shouts._

_“He’s coming!”_

_“Run!”_

_"Daddy, where are you?!”_

_"It burns!”_

_“Please, don’t go!”_

_“Mommy, come back!”_

_"He’s coming!”_

_“Monster!”_

_“Like hell I’ll let you destroy our home!”_

_“Please, somebody help!”_

_“I see him!”_

_Their mother would get them out. Their father would save the clan. They just had to be brave. They just had to stay close and follow. It was almost over. Just keep going. Don’t look._ _Don’t stop. Don’t think. Just go._

_A sharp turn and they descended, deeper into their underground city, headed for the secret of their clan, the eden that their mother guarded, tended, and held the precious burden of, the garden grave of Lord Hashirama, the First Hokage._

_Row after row of flower, herb and vegetation flourished under the shafts of sunlight that shone in strong, bright beams from holes in the earth above. This place had always provided such peace, such serenity and healing, and now, they fled through it as if it were catching fire behind them._

_The three reached the back of their underground field, and their mother tossed aside one of the many large, inscribed, stone tablets to reveal a hidden tunnel._

_“Quickly, my darlings, inside. Be brave through the dark and keep following the path, it will bring you outside.”_

_“Above ground?”_

_“Yes. Go north, as fast as your feet can carry you. Alert the first Leaf shinobi you find. They will make sure everything is alright. Wait in the village for us.”_

_“We’re not supposed to go above ground without an adult. Papa says-”_

_“My son…”_

_She reached a hand to wipe the tears streaking her child’s cheeks, ignoring the ones that welled in her own eyes._

_“You can do this. I believe in you. Hold tight to your sister. I will see you very soon, and I love you both more than I could ever say.”_

_Tenderly, kissing each of their foreheads, she stood, smiling fully down on them._

_“Now go, hurry…”_

_The children hadn’t made it ten feet before the cry of their mother stopped their sprint._

_“Mamma!”_

_“I’m alright, sweet ones. Just go!”_

_She ripped the snake that’d pierced into her flesh from behind without a care for how it tore through the meat of her calf. Any further damage was irrelevant at this point - the poison had already begun its flow through her veins._

_Despite his orders, her son fled to her side, shoving over the stone tablet to guard his tiny sister from view, while still allowing a small slot to fit his body back through when the time came to escape with her. Immediately, Yukimi dissolved into howling sobs._

_“You need to go with your sister! You need to get yourself out of here.”_

_The snake slithered away in retreat as the boy argued._

_“I’m not leaving you, Mama… I want to protect too…”_

_The tears in his mother’s eyes could no longer be contained, and they spilled out freely over her pained, and smiling face._

_“How like your father you are…”_

_The boy matched her smile, tears and all._

_“Alright my love, take some of my blood on your hand. I need you to smear it against that root growing just behind us. Do you see it?”_

_He obeyed without question, amazed when the root then quivered and retracted back into the earth, unthreading itself in and out of muddy wall in a large arc, until at last it disappeared all-together, the section of the wall it had carved out disappearing with it, opening up to a room most sacred and secret._

_“Go in my child. Pluck me the prettiest white blossom you can find, root and all, and then, very carefully,” She paused a moment, reaching with a groan to remove one of the many torches lining and lighting the wall, handing it to her son. “Light the rest on fire.”_

_The boy’s eyes widened, but again, he obeyed without question. If his mother had ordered it, it would be for the best._

_Torch held high, he crossed for the first time through the secret opening that he’d heard so many tales of before. From a break in the earth above him, a single, bright and brilliant light shaft shone down over a small growth of flowers, their aura nearly glowing in the heavenly light, and behind them, covered in an intricate tangle of vines, a humble headstone marked for The First Hokage, Lord Hashirama Senju._

_The child plucked a flower, swallowed his grief, and with pleading apologies to Lord Hashirama, touched his torch to the rest._

_“Excellent job, darling! Bring the flower here.”_

_His mother’s face had lost all it’s color, her skin yellowed and nearly translucent over swollen, pulsing, purpled veins. A thin stream of blood ran from the corner of her lips and over her chin. Still, she smiled with the splendor of the sun as she turned the stem in hand, admiring the fragrant white blossom._

_“My son, I need to ask too much of you, one last time… You know what this flower is… Lord Hashirama’s precious gift to us all - his legacy… Take it…”_

_He shook his head furiously._

_“No Mama, I can’t… Not me… The stories say it’s for a chosen one… Not me… You take it. Heal yourself…”_

_“Baby… I’m already gone…”_

_She met their foreheads, breath thinning, and tucked the flower in her son’s grasp._

_“Take it. Carry on the legacy for me. For all of us.”_

_“I-we… We don’t even know if I have the water and earth chakra natures… I’m not the special one, Mama… Please stay, Mama… Don’t leave me…”_

_The hiss and slither of snakes came clamoring down the corridor._

_He had found them, and he was close._

_“I named you with great intention, sweet one… Heavenly gift…”_

_She lifted a hand to cup his face, the light from her eyes fading fast._

_“No matter what happens with this flower, you are a most incredible legacy, and you will always be my heavenly gift… my Tenzo…”_

_“Mama!”_

_Her body fell, heavy and limp, into the dirt._

_A sob hadn’t broken from the boy when a chuckle echoed through the dark, wicked and sinister, the boy’s blood running cold with the devilish cadence of it._

_“Y-Yukimi - run!”_

_The piercing gleam of yellow, slitted eyes bore into the child knelt at his mother’s fresh corpse, and a flash of fangs shone with an amused smile._

_“How pitiful…” the villain rasped. “I expected so much more of a challenge. And here, guarding the grave of Hashirama the First, I face a child…”_

_Trembling and dizzy, the boy swallowed, too afraid to scream as he tore his gaze from his lifeless mother to behold the monster before him. He stood, shriveled and leaning over a gnarled staff, the face of a snake, skin of ivory scales, flaking and peeling as if shedding away, and his neck unnaturally stretched long, looping in its excess and looming over his prey._

_The boy swallowed again, blinking against the last of his tears, and stood, straightening his shoulders broad and wide, tightening his grip on the kunai in one hand, and on the precious legacy in the other, as he boldly stood to oppose the man who’d massacred his clan, the wretched, notorious, traitor of The Leaf Village, the unmistakable Lord Orochimaru._

_His thin, too-wide mouth opened with another heartless laugh, coughing and wheezing through the mockery, until his eyes caught on the fire blazing just over the child’s shoulder._

_Rage lit through Orochimaru all the brighter and more dangerous, his body rising with it and murderous intent._

_“What have you done?!”_

_Without a command, the masses of snakes surrounding them surged inward. Their jaws opened, bearing the poisonous curve of pointed fangs._

_The boy stood his ground, raising his blade to guard his face, and Lord Hashirama’s flower up and into his mouth._

_Orochimaru cried out at the sight, lunging forward, ready to claw the blossom out of the boy’s throat with his bare hands. But, white petals had already met with the boy’s tongue, melting into a sweet warm, syrup at the contact._

_For a moment, it seemed as though time held its breath, and the boy felt as though he’d swallowed the sun, each cell of his body igniting with overwhelming, brilliant, gleaming chakra glow. His body snapped rigid in the rush, arms splayed outward, head thrown back with a wild yell, tiny frame radiating with the power and light of Lord Hashirama, himself._

_Then, in the next breath, Orochimaru, with his massive jaw an instant away from snapping around the boy’s tender flesh, the light all but vanished, turning from pure chakra burn into elemental destruction._

_Water from the boy’s right hand, earth from his left. And finally, as they grew into cataclysmic disasters of their own, formed together between the child’s being, the forces fused into one, unlocking within the child the unmatched Kekkei Genkai, the legendary mokuton. Root, vine, underbrush, trunk, and brach erupted up from the earth in an explosion of muddy soil, rumbling through the entire hidden city to the open ground above._

_Orochimaru wailed against the onslaught, carving through it in a fury, refusing defeat._

_Even with the monster an inch from seizing him, knowing that death, in it’s certainty was about to take him, the boy smiled. He would die along with his clan. He would die being brave as his mother had asked. And, Tenzo would die the chosen legacy of Lord Hashirama._

 

Kinoe gasped back from memory into reality. His eyes faded into a distant, spark-less, gloss, shock stifling any tears from forming. The broken frame fell from his absent grasp, into the dirt. Fishcake drew in close, nudging against a limp hand and meowing softly with no response.

“Kinoe…” Kakashi started, against the lump in his throat. “You remembered…”

He couldn’t tell if his head nodded or not.

“Kinoe… Hey! Come back!”

His body took him away again, tearing him down the familiar corridor, following the footsteps of his former life, and carrying him back into the dead and large, shadowy expanse of the decaying garden room. The bloodstains of his mother still lay, stained into the dirt, Lord Hashirama’s headstone covered in ash. He rushed from one sight to the other, the wind knocked out of him at with each blink of his frantic eyes, as each memory was reborn before him.

Kakashi and Fishcake reached the teen as he tore against the stone tablet, still toppled on its side over their escape tunnel. Once overturned, it revealed only the empty dark, and a scrap of dirty, frayed fabric on a stray root jutting out from the mud walls.

Kinoe gripped hard onto the side of the tunnel’s opening, desperate to steady himself as his vision spun and dipped, stomach churning violently.

Retching, hard and sudden, the brunette vomited, and vomited until his stomach was empty. A hand pressed against his low back.

“Kinoe…”

“Why did you bring me here?!”

The brunette whipped around, sweat-coated, and panting, recoiling from Kakashi’s gentle touch.

“ _Why_?! Why did you do this to me?!”

He swayed with the wavering of his grip on consciousness, withdrawing in a stumble.

“I was fine up in my tower! I was fine not remembering! I didn’t need to remember! I don’t _want_ to remember!”

The shinobi stood still, his hands burying themselves in his pockets, and his eye now staring solemnly onto Kinoe. Fishcake meowed again, this time a little softer than before.

“Are you happy now?! Isn’t this what you wanted?!”

Kinoe stomped, shakily forward, spitting and screaming, wide, bulging, and red eyes refusing to settle on the shinobi that simply stood before him, an unmoving target for the teen’s grief.

“I should have never left! I should have never come with you!”

He struck powerless fists over Kakashi’s shoulders, shoving against him as his head hung to fall against the nin’s chest.

“Tell me you told me so! Tell me you were right! Reprimand me! Come on! I deserve it!”

Finally, his voice broke, and his hands stilled, balled into fists against Kakashi’s stomach.

“Why aren’t you saying you told me so? This is what you wanted. Rub it in… I am so stupid, so naive, so wrong... all the time… It was all a lie… All of my life is just a huge, heinous lie…”

He ground his teeth, throat burning with the suppression of a wail, unable to hold back a strained whine, and then exclaiming with a sob, “Why don’t you say something?!”

The nin reached a hand up and out of his pocket, allowing it to hover just beneath Kinoe’s chin.

“I’ve found, through the years, that there are pains too great for words…” Kakashi breathed in a broken whisper. “Anything I could say would be an insult to your grief…”

The brunette looked up to see a tear rolling down the shinobi’s cheek to match his own.

“But, I will say, dear Kinoe, that this certainly isn’t anything I ever wanted for you...”

The barricade against Kinoe’s emotion could hold no longer, and he crumbled there, into Kakashi, to wail and mourn the loss of all he’d known to be true.

Time melted into nothing, as did the world above. Only grief and the crackle of torches filled the dark.

Kakashi sunk into the dirt with Kinoe, holding him close in a a rocking wrestle, offering every ounce of sympathy and solidarity that overflowed from the cracks in his own broken soul. Fishcake wriggled in as well, and kneaded affectionate paws into his master, struck with the shame of his own naivety.

Weeping morphed into sobbed strings of recounted memory from Kinoe to his companions. Speaking the words aloud, allowing the memory from his mind out and explicitly clear, solidified them in their truth to the brunette, forcing him to acknowledge finally and fully, the reality of his past.

Kakashi swept the tears from Kinoe’s cheeks, the snot from his nose, and the sweat from his brow, simply listening, and holding tight with his own silent, slow stream of tears.

At long last, too exhausted to carry on, eyes enflamed and bone dry, Kinoe’s suffering fell quiet.

“What do I do now, Kakashi?”

“Take a drink of water.”

“Kakashi…”

The nin continued to smooth his thumb in soft circles over Kinoe’s cheek.

“One thing at a time… First, a drink of water, please.”

Kinoe obliged, draining back the last of Kakashi’s canteen.

“I want to go back by my… I want to get a few things…”

“Of course.”

Kakashi helped the teen to his feet, biting his lips behind his mask in dismay as Kinoe shakily stumbled forward, pulling his body in close to himself, weak, ashamed, and small.

After a brief trip back into Kinoe’s old home, they made their way back above ground to find the sun had nearly set.

“It’s nice, to be out of the stale air…” Kakashi mumbled, when neither of them knew what to say.

Kinoe hummed, staring down at his feet, and clutching tight the bag of belongings he’d retrieved.

“What do we do next?”

“I… I don’t know…” The shinobi confessed, defeatedly. “I know it’s nothing in comparison to all that you’re feeling, but, I’m a bit lost for what to do now as well…”

The pair met eyes.

“Do you…” Kakashi started again. “Do you want to come live in the Village?”

“I don’t know…”

“Are you alright if I call for backup now, to have him captured and prosecuted?”

“I don’t know!” Kinoe exclaimed in a whisper, new tears somehow having formed out of the nothingness he had left to offer his emotions. “I don’t know anything anymore…”

He sniffed hard, pressing a palm over his eyes a moment.

“I want… I want to see the release of the floating lanterns…”

Kakashi blinked in surprise.

“It was my dream… the dream of something big and beautiful for my life… my escape into hope while blinded by denial, imprisoned in that wretched tower…”

The brunette looked to the setting sun, the last curve of burning orange blurring over the horizon against a pink and dimming sky.

“I know I can’t go back to life before remembering anymore… But, I want to escape into that hope, just a moment longer… Please…”

Wordlessly, Kakashi took Kinoe’s hand, threading together their fingers, and assuring once again, “Of course.”

They drew away, to the edge of a nearby lake where the carved cliffside faces of the four Hokage could be seen from afar, and the nighttime lights of the village flickering on as the sun set.

Kakashi had imagined this destination would offer the best vantage point, and hoped his hunch would prove true. Wasting no time, Kinoe clasped his hands, and formed for them a lovely and long canoe that soon after floated them out into the still, dark waters.

As they waited for the lantern lighting to begin, Kinoe ran his fingers over the surface of the lake, Fishcake cuddled close in his lap.

“What if…” he started, a nauseous twist rising though his stomach again. “What if he can still be the man that… I mean, what if caring for me changed him? What if… Do you think he could be both? A monster that became my father?”

“Kinoe…”

“I remember it all clearly now, okay? I’m not just trying to stay in the dark…” Kinoe defended. “I just… I also know that I’ve been cared for up in that tower for many, many years now… He never really brought up my mokuton, other than putting it down, or telling me not to use it… He had plenty of opportunities to kill me… He could have kept me in a cage, or strapped to an examination table for experiments… Didn’t you say that’s what he used to do?”

Ripples stretched outward across the lake from Kinoe’s steady touch as the teen continued.

“It just doesn’t make sense… Even though he’s definitely rough around the edges, I’ve not known him as a monster since I woke from the coma… Do you think nursing me back to life, even if it was for his own, selfish gain, could have given him a change of heart?”

Kakashi’s mouth opened, words caught between the disappointment that tinted his view of the world, and the desire to bring any kind of hope and happiness, no matter how small, back to the young man in front of him.

“Maybe…”

A smiled spread over Kinoe’s lips as he blinked back the fresh spring of tears.

“I know it’s stupid… I know I should hate him… I do hate him… I don’t ever want to see him again, and I want him to pay… But…”

He tugged the messy folds of his yukata tighter around his shrunken shoulders, barely whimpering, bare and raw, “I want to believe some of it was real…”

Kakashi outstretched a hand, cupping the brunette’s face and admitting, “I do too...”

Kinoe’s cheek heated against the nin’s palm, and he found himself unable to look upward to meet the intense eye pouring over him. Instead, in his coyness, Kinoe caught sight, in the glassy reflection of the lake, of the first lantern lifting up and into the night sky. As a solitary orange ember, it floated upward, drawn into the endless black.

Kinoe stood, following after the lantern, mouth open and breath shallow, as he crossed to the bow of their canoe.

Then, all at once, like a blanket of light rising up from the village, hundreds of lanterns floated up to illuminate the night in soft, flickering firelight.

Kinoe couldn’t help the smile that bloomed between his lips, nor the nearly sobbed laughter that rolled out at the sight.

Hundreds of lights became nearly a thousand, as if they were multiplying on their own, filling the sky as the most magnificent starlight, and then beginning their slow and graceful dance downward, over and around the lake.

With the black waters as a mirror, Kinoe very quickly found himself floating through the galaxy itself, bathed in the simple, overwhelming radiance.

It was more than he imagined.

Yet, somehow, surrounded by the upmost grandeur of overwhelming beauty, Kinoe found his attention pulled back into the boat and behind him, to the young man that’d brought him this far.

In his hands, Kakashi held two lit paper lanterns which he extended to Kinoe with a soft smile.

“When did you... How?”

The nin glanced down to a pair of open summoning scrolls on his lap.

“Picked then up while you were distracted by succulent table at the festival this afternoon.”

Kinoe marveled at the gesture.

“Shall we?”

In their own dance, the pair of lanterns floated upward to join the others, circling around one another in their graceful ascent, until indistinguishable from the multitudes released before them.

It was in this moment, that Kakashi reached a quivering hand forward to intertwine once again with Kinoe’s.

Heart a-thunder, Kinoe looked very seriously into the visible eye of his guide.

“Kakashi, I want to tell you something.”

The shinobi leaned inward, waiting and listening.

“My real name is Tenzo... that’s the name my real parents gave me, at least...”

Kakashi gave an understanding hum, and then tried name out over his own tongue.

“Tenzo...”

His thumb stroked over the back of the brunette’s palm.

“Do you want to be called Tenzo again?”

“I-I don’t know... I want to somehow be both Tenzo and Kinoe...”

He looked down into his lap, touched, when Kakashi’s other hand tilted his chin back upward.

“I understand... I’m so sorry I didn’t find you sooner...”

“Kakashi...”

“I mean it... I’m so sorry you were kept in the dark for so long... For what it’s worth, I think you are both Kinoe and Tenzo. They formed you, shaped you, made you into the man you are now… Courageous, strong, wonderful… and, moving forward, you can be whoever you want to be… Just know, whatever you decide, wherever we go from here, I will-I want to go with you... if-if you will have me...”

Kinoe laughed through a single sob, Kakashi’s fingers lingering under his chin as his thumb extended to land just under the teen’s opening lips.

The pair exchanged shallow breaths that flickered in time with the firelight floating around them.

“I’d be honored, Kakashi…”

Fishcake’s tail swatted over his eyes as the space between his master and the silver haired shinobi shrunk nearly into nothing, and then peeking a curious eye out when Kakashi raised a hand to lift his hitai-ate to look into both of Kinoe’s eyes with his own mismatched pair.

The nin didn’t stop there, however, and gripped the same hand against the fabric of his face mask, tugging the spandex down, slowly and shaking.

Kinoe’s mouth fell open, his own reach responding in our instinct to glide an awed caress over the fullness of Kakashi’s exposed face.

“Kakashi…” Kinoe crooned, their knees brushing as they moved in closer, hovering over the clasp of their lips and the embrace of their bodies. “You’re so… gods… I don’t know what to even say…”

He traced a thumb over the scabbed slash that Fishcake had made in his cheek just the night before. Somehow, even with it marring the perfect smooth pale and blush of Kakashi’s skin, to call the shinobi breathtaking hardly scratched the surface. And somehow, despite their apprehension, inexperience, and hesitation in effect from the heartache they’d both experienced, the pair melted together effortless and sure, basking in more than moonlight and a thousand floating lanterns, but also in a light all new for each of them, a light warm, and real, and bright, shifting the perspective and trajectory of their lives in this single, still, timeless moment.

Overwhelmed by it, Kinoe exhaled another soft laugh as a tear slid out of wide eyes, his head shaking in disbelief.

“What is it?” Kakashi whispered.

Kinoe opened his mouth, stammering for words other than the ones that burned through his chest.

“I think... Kakashi, I think I’m...”

He shook his head again, blinking back through blurry vision into the concerned, mismatched stare so close to him.

“It’s just, I feel like I’m in a fairy tale...”

Kakashi hummed, low and pleased, his touch taking up new and tender action under Kinoe’s chin; the nin’s other hand coming to join in the cupping of the teen’s quivering face.

“No,” he corrected, barely audible, breathing the response into Kinoe’s parted mouth. “This is better... Somehow, this is _real_...”

Neither man could stutter a breath as they folded away the last few millimeters separating them, and brushed, ever-so delicately, the kiss of their lips.

The thundering through their chests increased ten-fold, sharp and broken breaths punctuating the sweet strain, both of their bodies buzzing with an exhilaration they’d never so much as dreamed of knowing.

Electric anticipation surged between them. The thrill of such affection, and the immediate, intoxicating desire to dive head first, and eyes closed into the depths of this inconceivable intimacy.

In this tense giddiness, Kinoe found a loss of fine chakra control threading the fragrant bloom of about two dozen fresh flowers through his braid.

Kakashi swooned, utterly helpless. The tomoe of his red eye swirled to capture perfectly forever, the beauty in his arms.

“Kinoe...” he murmured in his loss for words.

Yet, the brunette shook his head.

“No...”

He met the shinobi’s concern, a fierce gleam lit through his soul as he decided.

“I am Tenzo...”

Kakashi’s eyes slipped closed once more, an elated sigh bursting out of him.

“Yes, you are...”

The nin beamed in pride.

“It suits you,  _Tenzo..."_

Wordless, and swollen of indescribable feeling, the pair again leaned inward for the meeting of their lips, this time, however, their more confident expression found itself abruptly interrupted by the smoky, white poof of Pakkun presence aboard their small boat.

Fishcake shrieked and hissed, hair standing on end across and arched back, as the canoe rocked and shook with the new weight and startled leaps of its passengers.

“Kakashi, my apologies for the intrusion, but there’s been a sighting of Lord Orochimaru to the far north. He’s moving without haste, but is clearly making his way back to the tower.”

When Kinoe looked back to his guide, he found the nin’s mask, and — had already been replaced, along with a resharpened focus gleaming though his visible eye.

“Understood. Thank you, Pakkun.”

Kakashi turned back to Kinoe, hesitance and regret pulling his next words taut.

“I’m sorry to ask, but time is no longer our ally. We have to begin taking some action… Do you know what you want do to?”

Feeling suddenly suffocated, Kinoe squeezed sweaty hands into tight fists, the expectant gaze of the future searing into him through the eyes of Kakashi, Pakkun, and Fishcake. The floating lanterns surrounding them were no longer the romantic fairy lights they had been moments before, and had instead become the lost, nameless souls of children kidnapped and murdered by the man he called father, by the man he hated, by the man he wanted to still call father, by the man quickly on his way to find his prisoner had gone and in the arms of a shinobi.

“Tenzo…” Kakashi whispered, calling him back through the fog. “It’s going to be alright. We’re together in this…”

“I… I want to talk to him…”

“Talk to him?” Pakkun exclaimed. “You want to talk to him? The slipperiest, notorious, vile, undying villain of our age and you want to _talk_ to him? This kid is out of his mind, Kakashi!”

Kinoe held the shinobi’s torn expression, his own eyes swollen and pleading.

“Alright…”

Pakkun was undone.

“You’re both _insane_! Kakashi, pull your head out of your ass. We need to call for back up and finally apprehend this bastard.”

Kakashi raised a hand to pause his bewildered companion.

“I share your concern, Pakkun,” he confessed solemnly. “More than I can say.”

His hand extended, brushing a thumb over the back of Kinoe’s white knuckles.

“But, circumstances warrant Tenzo answers, directly from Lord Orochimaru to him… and I will not be the one to deny him that…”

Fishcake crossed from the bow of the canoe to curl between his master and their guide, radiating of his own concern.

Words lost in the welling of tears in his eyes once again, Kinoe mouthed his emphatic thanks to Kakashi, and pulled Fishcake close in to his chest.

After a nod, Kakashi turned back to Pakkun, starting the formation of a plan, and assuaging the pug’s protests when he ordered a few of the ninken to fetch a few trusted comrades to come and stand by in the event of needing immediate back up.

Kinoe’s mind fogged over as the two ninja continued on with logistics. He wanted to talk to his father. To Orochimaru. And yet, what would he even say? What would he ask? How could he even muster the strength and composure to stand in his presence again? His stomach turned, face paling and prickling with an icy chill. Perhaps it was best if he didn’t see him again. Better if he had Kakashi show him how to disappear into thin air as he was sure the shinobi knew how. Even better still, if he disappeared from living, no longer to be a prisoner to the wicked, or a burden to the saints.

“Here, Tenzo,” Kakashi said, pulling from a satchel on his hip, a kunai. This one, however, was different than the rest. It’s handle, extended in length, wooden, and marked with carved characters that read “Flying Thunder God,” and it’s blade triple-pronged, making it far more specialized than any of the standard issue blades Kakashi had used or revealed before. “This kunai was once my sensei’s.”

“You sensei that became the Fourth Hokage?”

Kakashi nodded.

“He created many special techniques, and I tried to copy and master as many as I could. Passing this one, required his patient teaching, and the help of a weapons-smith to modify a few blades for my own use.”

Kinoe turned the weapon over in his grasp, asking, “What do they do?”

“They’re imbued with my chakra, and wherever they are, I can teleport to in an instant. It takes quite a bit of chakra for me to do, so I hardly use the technique if I can help it. I’m a far cry from Minato Sensei… But, keep it close on your person, somewhere hidden on your body. And, at the hint of any danger, a raised voice, a quick cross towards you, a raised hand, anything at all, you only need to focus a bit of your own chakra towards the blade. I’ll feel it,” he pulled a twin kunai from the same satchel, promising thereafter, “and I will be there in an instant for us to withdraw.”

Understanding, Kinoe nodded.

“You sure you want to one of those get so close to Orochimaru, boss?” Pakkun asked. “Could be dangerous if he got ahold of it. Plus, you never let those things out of your sight.”

“Tenzo will keep it safe, and it will keep Tenzo safe,” Kakashi replied with strong conviction. “That’s what matters most.”

He re-pocketed his blade, smiling through his own fear.

“This way I can still be right there with you.”

Kinoe returned the smile, the fog in his mind remaining, but suddenly illuminated again with the light of hope.

Yes, he had lived a lie. Yes, he’d been a prisoner. Yes, he was terrified and unprepared.

Around him, the thousand lanterns that floated, shining with the soul of each child needlessly lost, many by the hands of his father, burning for requital in the black of night. In his arms, Fishcake, his comfort, his rock, his joy, ever by his side. And in front of him, Kakashi, the liberator of his mind, holding a hand out at the threshold of an unclaimed future.

Yes, he could do this, for the company that would face all that was to come alongside him, proved rich and plenty in the moonlight.


	7. Chapter 7

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Kakashi asked.

Kinoe, standing under the last bit of tree cover before the great open field in which his tower stood, eyes wide, and mouth dry, nodded slowly in response.

In the dark of the night, beauty of the fire-lit floating lanterns long gone, the tower loomed, ominous and inescapable.

He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to be doing any of it, actually. But he needed to. Though it was terribly unfair, life had ripped him from its dark, but regular security, and thrown him, naked and aching into the light of this new, complicated reality. There was nothing to do, but to move forward. Whatever his life was to look like in the light, despite all the things he did not yet know, Kinoe knew he wanted to be the one carving out this new way for himself, wherever it led.

“I wish you would let me come with you...”

“No, I don’t want to aggravate the situation, add any extra tension, make him resistant to talk, or listen to me. He wasn’t ever really good at either of those to begin with.”

Kinoe gave a short, half-hearted exhale of laughter, his attempt to break through Kakashi’s focused concern, unfruitful.

“A threatening glare, a tensing of his body, anything at all,” the nin urged, gesturing lightly to his kunai, hidden under the brunette’s yakuta, against his back. “Call for me. I’ll be there in an instant.”

Kinoe nodded again, swallowing against his arid throat.

At his feet, Fishcake meowed and pawed against this master’s shin.

“I know, you want to come, but you remember what he said he’d do to you if I even asked to leave the tower again. And now I've actually left...”

Kinoe knelt, and snuggled his companion close.

“Kakashi will make sure nothing happens to you until I return.”

Pressing the soft pink of his paw against Kinoe’s cheek, the tabby cocked his head, as if to ask who would be up in the tower to make sure his master would be okay. A touched smile broke over Kinoe’s face.

“I’m going to be just fine. No need to worry,” he assured, despite the violent churn of his stomach. “And hey, I’ll bring back your feather toy, okay?”

The two shared a last embrace before Kinoe stood, turning to face whatever was to come in the tower before him.

“Tenzo,” Kakashi encouraged gently. “You can do this. We can do this.”

The brunette nodded, attempting to motivate his first footsteps forward, when he was interrupted once more. This time the light brush of Kakashi’s fingers caught the silky sleeve of his yukata.

“And Tenzo… Please don’t hesitate to call for me…”

The nin gave a slight gasp as Kinoe crashed against his chest, arms wrapping tight and pulling Kakashi close.

“I won’t,” he promised.

Kinoe forced himself away from the shinobi that had swept so suddenly into his life, turned his world upside down and pumped his heart with adrenaline. He tore himself from comfort and security, braving onward, out from the cover of shadow and tree, into the wide openness in which his tower stood.

As he approached, eyes fixed on the singular window from which he had constantly gazed, Kinoe watched a rope launch outward. It caught over the large iron hook and swung down the full length of the tower until touching down on the grass below.

His father was already there. Waiting and watching.

He’d come so far so fast. It was too much. Too much to face him again. To go back up there. Too much of a risk.

Finding himself at the base of the tower, staring at the worn rope just outside the grasp of his sweaty and shaking fingertips, Kinoe glanced over his shoulder, back to Fishcake and Kakashi hidden far beyond in under tree cover.

The rope in front of him swayed, and, turning back to face all things, Kinoe took hold, pulling it taught and steady.

He could do this. He had to.

The rope rose upward through the night, Kinoe with it, both returning inside through the tower’s open window.

Though he’d only been outside its walls for a few days, returning, he felt as though he’d never known the place before. The modest furniture, the bookshelf, his bed, they were all as he knew them, but they no longer belonged to him. It was a foreign place to him now, dusty and dark, belonging to the unknowing prisoner that had been trapped inside, not the young man who’d returned, determined to demand answers from the creature leaning against the wall in the dark, the one that had declared himself father and Lord.

“Kinoe, my child...”

The hiss crooned through crooked smile and fanged teeth.

“That’s not...” he started, the oxygen in the room thinning with his nerve. “Don’t call me that... please...”

A light, amused chuckle came in response from Orochimaru, his smile remaining. The shine of his yellow eyes seared into Kinoe through the dim ambiguity of the room.

The silence grew thick, heavy, a suffocating haze to the brunette who’s mind flooded with a million horrifying expectations.

“You’re not going to ask me where I’ve been?” Kinoe managed.

Nothing.

“I’ve been gone a few days now. I went to the village, and...”

His hands balled into fists, teeth grinding another silent moment before he forced himself forward.

“And I went back to where you... I went back...”

Sweat slid down his temple, the salt of it stinging against his dry tongue as he bit quickly over his lip and demanded more courage of himself.

“I’ve remembered,” he revealed, his false father unimpressed. “You killed them, all of them. My family, my clan. You’re not... you took me... I’m not...”

Kinoe gasped for air, his head shaking, and cheeks wet. Orochimaru simply stood, expressionless and observing. It enraged and unnerved him. How could he just stand there? He’d left the tower. He finally knew the truth. He was being disrespectful and defiant. The tension boiled up inside of him until he was practically screaming.

“Say something!”

The teen’s cry echoed briefly though the tower. Silence resettled, and with it, a pressure unspeakable.

Finally, the thin lips of Orochimaru opened, white hand lifting outward.

“Come here, Kinoe.”

“That’s not my name!”

“Come _here!_ Kinoe...”

Kinoe went rigid; his captor's command shooting an icy chill through his spine. Instinctively, though as if through mud, he obeyed.

Whatever was to come next, would only become worse if he resisted.

“Go change out of that disgusting yukata at once,” Orochimaru instructed flatly. “You look ridiculous.”

Something between a laugh and a sob broke from Kinoe.

“I need answers first,” he whispered.

Orochimaru raised an eyebrow.

“You haven’t asked anything.”

Kinoe ground his teeth, steeling himself and snapping his eyes to meet the monster looking down on him.

“Why?” He cried _“Why?!_

The sinister smile over the snake’s face spread, curling as he asked back in mock innocence, “Why?”

“Why didn’t you kill me with the rest of my clan?” Kinoe began, hysteria taking him. “Why did you take me? Why do you keep me up here? Convince me that you are my father? Why the pretense that I’m up here for my own safety? _Why?!”_

Orochimaru let silence fall through the tower once more, until he offered a slight shrug and murmured lazily, “Those are a lot of questions, Kinoe...”

“Of which you have answered none!” Kinoe spat back.

In the next breath, Orochimaru was an inch from the brunette’s face, teeth gleaming and eyes piercing as he commanded,  “Then ask me what you truly need to know.”

Kinoe swallowed. There was too much that he needed to know. His stomach swam, heart thudding wild against the cage of his chest.

“Do you-" he managed, his voice once again that of a small, broken boy. “Do you love me?”

Orochimaru straightened his stance, an amused, pitiful hum escaping him before asking, “ _That’s_ what you need to know?”

“That’s the only thing that matters!” Kinoe exclaimed back. “I need to know if all of it was a lie. I know you killed them. I know I’m not - that you’re not my father. But why would you call yourself my father if you did not _want_ to be on some level?”

Wiping the tears that had slipped away from tired eyes, Kinoe too, straightened himself before carrying on.

“Why keep me? Why care for me? Did... was change possible? Did you learn to love? To love me? When I was in my coma... you chose to nurse me back to health... You didn’t have to do that. It doesn’t match with the monster I remember slaughtering my people... Did you - do you love me as your son?”

Orochimaru’s smile faded.

“Answer me!”

“Love is not a familiar thing to me, Kinoe,” he responded suddenly and softly, and for the first time, with a shred of concern on his face. “But, yes... I imagine I do have great love for you now...”

“How can I believe that? You take my blood and pieces of my body - how do I know you aren’t just after the mokuton?”

Orochimaru raised his hand once more. This time, much to Kinoe’s awed bewilderment, a branch, strong and thick grew forth from the pale palm. It stretched upward into a beam about seven feet tall, before the shinobi cut off the production and snatched his new staff out of the air.

“I obtained your mokuton long ago.” He explained. “I hadn’t planned on having you take in the last Hashirama flower, or that it would grant you the mokuton. There wasn’t a single intention in my mind to keep you after I extracted your ability and made it my own, nor had I imagined that you, or anyone would contain the potential to be what you have become in my life...”

The glow of his eyes darted away, distancing themselves from the dark corner into which they stared.

“I was born into being a shinobi. My parents shinobi before me. I was on the battlefield as soon as I was old enough to hold a kunai. War was constant and unyielding, and when it took my parents, I realized very quickly that there was only one way to survive, one thing that mattered - _power_... It was everything trained for, fought for, worth killing for... the reason for living... I dedicated myself to become the master of all jutsu, and I very nearly am. I abandoned the village, was branded a rogue, and sought power by any means necessary. After I’d claimed every ability within reach, the pursuit of the mokuton became desperate, all-encompassing. A legendary power, god-like, and lost with the death of Lord Hashirama the First. Your clan, their lives were nothing in comparison to my lust for the mokuton. I admit, only reason I took you, spared your life, was to take back what sacred power you’d stolen out from underneath my grasp. And I did.”

Kinoe took a tiny step forward, asking, “And then...?”

His false father drew a breath, releasing it with a slow, confused response.

“And then, somehow, extracting Lord Hashirama’s power, nurturing you in order to keep you alive long enough to get what I wanted... I discovered something... a warmth, bright and incredible through my body... revitalizing, invigorating... Something to shift my perspective on my mortal life... something I needed more than any power I’d sought after before...”

A smirk twitched at the corner of his mouth.

“When you came-to, you didn’t remember anything, not even your own name. I took that for my own advantage. I renamed you. I called you my son. I reinvented the past in my favor. No one would allow me to keep you if we left the tower, even if you were my own flesh and blood. I am still a rogue ninja. The crimes I have committed would overshadow any chance I could dream of having of mercy from the village.”

He finally looked back into the red and swollen eyes of the young man in front of him, desperate for his affection.

“I cannot lose you, my flower. Not to those who would see you killed to snuff out the last of the Hashirama legacy. Not to a village that would only use you as a weapon for their wars. To them, you would only be a tool of destruction and death. To me, you are the source of my new life.”

Blinking against fresh tears, Kinoe gripped a hand over his heart. He swallowed, a stuttered breath sobbing out between clenched teeth. Orochimaru took his own step forward, arm extending to rest a heavy hand atop Kinoe’s head.

“Go and change clothes.”

Kinoe’s knees felt suddenly weak, stomach twisting.

“I’m sure it’s been quite the trying and exhausting journey. But we are reunited now, and for that I am so glad.”

A dizziness swayed the room for the teen.

“No...”

The tower fell into a deadly silence.

“No?” Orochimaru asked in return, incredulous.

Kinoe’s mouth opened, his will fighting through the fear, doubt, and the flare of cursed illness through his trembling body.

In his mind, flashed a thousand images, and among them, the sight Kakashi’s kunai against his back, shining of escape.

Yet, he remained, drawing up strength from the hope that freedom was just outside his grasp.

“If what you say is true, if you are truly changed, if you truly love me...”

“You mean to test me?”

“I mean to give myself my own new life...”

Orochimaru’s suffocating glare relaxed, his slight, sinister grin returning with it.

“My, he’s poisoned you far more than I imagined he could in such a short time.”

A hot panic washed over Kinoe’s cheeks.

“He?”

“Please, Kinoe... you think I don’t know who’s waiting so anxiously for your return? His chakra is practically burning through your clothes from that kunai he had you place on your back.”

Kinoe gaped, horrified, “How did you...?

“You think I didn’t catch the scent of his ninken on my way back to the tower? You think I didn’t also catch traces of his scent all over your own skin?” Orochimaru mocked. “Honestly, Kinoe... I know you are naive, but you truly expected me to believe you left the tower on your own?”

Stammering without a plan or cover, Kinoe found himself interrupted.

“No, that Hatake brat has been trailing after me since his youth... I’ve slipped out of his discovery countless times. I should have cut him down a long time ago when I’d had the chance.”

Kinoe recoiled at the thought.

“I thought you were changed…”

“I will do what it takes to protect us, Kinoe,” his false father assured, wicked gleam shining of murderous intent.

Trying to steady himself, Kinoe explained, “Kakashi is only here now because he wants to protect me.”

“Please, Kinoe…” Orochimaru scoffed in return. “How stupid have you become? The only reason he is here, the only reason he has put up with you these last few days, is to get to me.”

“Then why would he escort me all over the village? Why would he take so much time?”

“I wasn’t home, Kinoe. He needed to keep his bargaining chip busy and complicit. It was also a spectacular amount of time to turn you against me.”

Indignant, Kinoe implored, “Then why isn’t he up here now to claim you?”

“Because the timing isn’t right!” Orochimaru snapped back, drawing in for a close attack yet again, peering down on the ignorance of the teen before him. “He’s quite adept in his own skill, but to face me alone would be a death sentence, and he knows it. I’m sure he had you two scurry back here as soon as he received word from his ninja mongrels that I had returned. I’m sure he told you he was going to call for back-up in the event I went wild and tried to attack you. Then he sent that blade with you so he could teleport up here for my capture as soon as that back-up arrives.”

Kinoe shook his head.

“He wouldn’t do that. I trust him.”

In a sudden burst, Orochimaru peeled from his wheezing lungs a sickly, booming laughter.

“Have I taught you nothing, Kinoe,” he sighed on the way down from amusement before snapping back into venomous conviction. “ _Never_ trust a shinobi.”

“None of the shinobi I have met have been anything like you described them,” Kinoe countered. “Yes, they have terrifying ability, but they wield it with discretion. They’re dispatched on missions for the good of the village. They aren’t just mercenaries.”

“How would you know what they are? Your exposure has been highly controlled over the past, what, two days? I was one of them from birth!” Orochimaru whipped away, spitting and shouting into the echoing dark of his tower. “They are master manipulators! They are snakes in the grass! They care for victory only - Kakashi more than the others!”

“He’s not like that!” Kinoe shouted back, tender memories of the last few days flashing though his mind and fueling his courage. “Kakashi genuinely cares. He owns the mistakes that the village has made in the past and wants to make a better future. You said the village would take me and make me a weapon as soon as they found me - but he _stopped_ his mission for my benefit.”

“Kakashi would never stop a mission. Never.”

“You don’t know him like I do!”

Freezing, Orochimaru turned to leer back over his shoulder.

 _“Like you do?”_ He asked, appalled. “My my, were you that desperate? You not only immediately trust the first stranger that breaks into your home, but you allow yourself to become even further blinded with some kind of romantic fantasy?”

The snake nearly wretched over the words, Kinoe pinned under the ridicule, flushing violet, dripping of sweat and shame.

“Bravo, Kakashi, what a tactic…” Orochumaru mused to himself. “I never would have guessed that hormones and delusions would have been the thing to get me captured. Nearly fifteen years I keep us safe and out of sight - and _this_... Brilliant.”

He narrowed back in on Kinoe, asking with disgust, “He hasn’t defiled you has he?”

“He - what - no…” A thousand emotions flared through Kinoe as he fought for mental footing and any kind of response. “It’s not-it’s not a tactic. We’ve grown to understand each other over time.”

“The past two days?”

"He cares about me!”

“He is a cold-blooded assassin!”

Desperate, Kinoe defended, “He is haunted by the trauma he’s experienced as a shinobi! He can’t sleep! He told me about the loss of his mother - his father’s suicide - his sensei and teammates dying! He was scared, we both were, but he let me in - he showed me- he showed me his face…”

Orochimaru once again looked unimpressed and disappointed, casting unrelenting judgement.

“Normal people, people without secrets, don’t hide their faces in the first place, Kinoe.”

At this Kinoe’s body shook, abandoning terror and embarrassment to his adamant rage.

“ _Normal people_ don’t kidnap children and keep them locked in a tower after slaughtering their people! He wants _freedom_ for me! He wanted me to know the truth - which is more than you _ever_ wanted for me!”

Orochimaru charged back across the room.

“He wanted to use you to get to me, so he showed you a side of the truth that would turn you against me.”

Kinoe squared up to the man he’d once called father.

“He showed me the sides of you that you wanted to keep lost from my memory!”

“Enough Kinoe!”

Kinoe crumpled to the ground, arms raised in what would have been fruitless shielding from the wooden staff his father raised to strike.

“Enough of this!”

The staff stilled through the air, coming down to once again stand at the shinobi’s side as he continued in omnipotent authority.

“We are leaving this instant. I will not have cared for you and kept you safe for this long to be captured, and have you taken from me now.

Turning his back, the snake crossed away, head held high.

“Dispose of that chakra blade and we’ll go.”

Kinoe fought the bile rising up his throat, hand clutching over his laboring lungs.

He wasn’t strong enough for this. He was only an orphan. No training or means to claim freedom from the villain that so boldly reclaimed his captor. He had no merit to deserve the young, kind, broken shinobi waiting for him below. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.

His eyes squeezed shut, and he searched within himself for the strength to even stand and leave with his father.

Instead of a victim’s strength, he found instead, his four-year-old eyes reflected in the warm believing eyes of his dying mother.

 

_“Take it. Carry on the legacy for me. For all of us.”_

_“I-we… We don’t even know if I have the Water and Earth chakra natures… I’m not the special one, Mama… Please stay, Mama… Don’t leave me…”_

_“I named you with great intention, sweet one… Heavenly gift…No matter what happens with this flower, you are a most incredible legacy, and you will always be my heavenly gift… my_ _Tenzo…”_

 

“No!”

Orochimaru stopped dead.

“What did you say to me?”

Kinoe sniffed, looking up from his white knuckles on the dirty floor and declaring, “I said, ‘no.’ I’m not going with you.”

He held his breath as he waited for wrath to reign down on him, watching, paralyzed in his defiance, as his false father’s hands flexed in and out of fists.

“Fine...” Orochimaru hissed finally. “I see how it is...”

Slowly, he turned back to the teen he’d left in a ball on the ground, his voice dripping of a sticky, sweet poison. “Become so wise on your little adventure out of the tower, have you? Remember a bit of the past and all the sudden forget your incompetence in the present, never mind your complete ignorance to the whole truth of reality. But, _fine_. If it takes me letting you go out to learn the hard way, then so be it. Run off to the romance that you’ve bought in to. Go, join the shinobi. Live in the village. You’ll see. When they’ve used you up, taken every last ounce of your humanity and will, when you’ve been betrayed for the last time, it is my hope that you’ll be able to crawl your way back to the care and protection of your father. I will take you back. I won’t say I told you so.”

Kinoe swallowed hard as Orochimaru knelt down to his eye level.

“But, if you’re going to test me in this way, be sure you at least test your precious savior, and ask him for the truth...”

“I know enough truth about you.”

“Oh, not about me, my flower… No, I want you to ask for the truth of the Cold-Blooded, Friend-Killer Kakashi…”

Face contorting, Kinoe flinched backward.

“Don’t call him that.”

Orochimaru chuckled.

“It’s not what I call him. It’s what they all call him. It’s his legend.”

“You’re nothing but a liar…”

Kinoe moved to stand, his arm quickly caught in an icy, crushing grip.

“Ask him what drove his father to suicide. Ask him if the village placed the value of their missions so much higher than the lives of their people. If when the incredible White Fang of the Leaf Village, Hatake Sakumo abandoned his missive to go back and try to rescue a comrade, he was shamed and shunned so mercilessly by the Village that he was driven to take his own life and forsake his son into orphan-hood.”

The notion didn’t seem too far away from what could have been the truth of a village too lost in war, a village that had since grown. This didn’t need to matter. This didn’t need to trip him up. However, the monster was far from finished.

“Ask him if his team mate, Uchiha Obito, a child, was crushed to death trying to rescue a captured teammate on a mission, after Captain Kakashi made the order to leave behind their friend, and forced Obito to go back alone. Ask him if he was disappointed to only be able to retrieve one of the Uchiha child’s coveted eyes from his fresh corpse. Ask him if he was able to see any of his teammate’s last sights through his single, red, stolen Sharingan.”

Kinoe shook his head, pulling against the tightening grip keeping him bound to the floor.

“Ask him if he stayed back in the Village when his Sensei, the Hokage at the time, went to engage the Nine-Tailed beast and met his own end, beside his wife and newborn child. Ask him if he felt guilty for not going to help when he heard the news that his teacher and leader had been killed.”

“Stop it. You’re twisting things. He’ll tell me these things in his own time!”

“Ask him his body count. Ask him the age of his first murder. Ask him when he stopped feeling remorse. Ask him how handsomely he will be rewarded when he brings me in as his prize. Ask him what he will demand in excess when he presents a Wood Style-user as a bonus.”

“I don’t want to hear anymore! Please!”

“But, Kinoe, my son, my flower, most importantly of all, ask him about Rin…”

Pointed nails pierced into Kinoe’s tender flesh.

“Ask how he was so effortlessly able to slaughter his only living teammate, his childhood sweetheart. When he decided to turn, just as they were on the outskirts of the village, and run his lightning blade through her chest, ask him if he at least cradled her lifeless body to the ground, or if he simply yanked his arm free and left her lying in a pool of her own blood.”

Kinoe’s memory flashed through Kakashi’s panic, the experience taking on new meaning and life. He’d raised his own lightning blade over Kinoe. He’d insisted he wasn’t safe to be around.

It couldn’t be. Not his Kakashi.

In his eyes, Kinoe remembered, had also been terror, regret, and utter anguish.

He couldn’t have done these things. He couldn’t have murdered her.

“I don’t believe anything of what you say…” Kinoe lied.

Orochimaru released the clamp of his hand over the teen’s arm, paying no heed to the fresh blood that seeped out from under his nails and down Kinoe’s forearm.

“That’s fine, you don’t trust me anymore, I understand,” He said, no real hint of concession through the words. “But, if you’re going to revel in the truth, if you truly long to be so wise and enlightened, ask him for the _whole_ truth…”

Orochimaru stood, offering a hand of help that lifted a resistant Kinoe to his feet.

“I’ll wait for you one hour, and then I will need to seek a new hiding place…”

Frozen, Kinoe urged his body to move, to make his way back down the tower and to freedom. Yet, he found himself paralyzed by the echoing ring of “Cold-Blooded, Friend-Killer Kakashi,” through his ears.

“Well, go on then. Go and meet your dear prince. And Kinoe…”

A white hand stroked over brown locks, strands of hair falling loose under the tender tousle.

“No matter what happens, you’ll always be mine…”

Orochimaru met his lips to the crown of Kinoe’s head, and then he was gone.

Kinoe gasped a weak breath into failing lungs, his knees hitting hard against the wooden slats beneath him. He looked to his arm, smearing the blood with the sleeve of his yukata, immediately frantic at the stain it would inevitably leave in his impulsive stupidity. Panicked, chest heaving, eyes nearly dark at the weakness through his body, Kinoe ripped at the fabric over his flesh, desperate to get it off, peeling away each beautiful layer until he stood bare, sweating and shaking in the middle of his tower.

How did one muster strength for this? Where did insight and wisdom come from? Were there a way to develop discernment enough to determine where truth might actually lie? Did he even want to know any more truth at this point?

Before unconsciousness took him, the sight of a small parcel on their small dining table caught Kinoe’s eye. The chakra tea his father had gone to fetch. Kinoe fumbled forward and shoved a tea bag into his mouth, drenching it with saliva as quickly as he could and sucking out the bitter medicinal mix.

This bought him enough time to brew a proper cup. He swallowed it entirely, careless of, and slightly relishing the burn that ignited his mouth, and sizzled down his throat, filling his belly with fire.

The room began to steady. The cold of being naked and afraid settling through the tremble of his bones.

He had done it; he had told his father, his kidnapper, “no.” He had stood his ground and demanded his freedom. All he had to do now was leave his wretched tower and take it.

Kinoe searched through his chest of drawers for fresh clothes, dressing slowly, and taking a moment to wash away the dried blood Orochimaru had left behind from fresh wounds to his forearm. As the water swirled down the drain, all Kinoe could see, over and over, was the image of Kakashi, desperate to scrub his hands away in the night. Kinoe understood now. It had been blood. He was trying to wash Rin’s blood from his hands.

He swallowed, eyes squeezing shut. There had to be a way that this made sense. There had to be a truth to which he could make a safe haven.

He trusted Kakashi.

He had also trusted his father.

Breaking through the confusion and indecision, the sight of Fishcake’s feather toy on his nightstand caught the teen’s attention.

Kinoe wiped the sweat from his brow, and released his hair from its braid, letting the mass of tresses fall to the floor with a thump, loose flower blossoms cascading free.

He snatched the toy from his nightstand and charged for the window, tossing his long locks to catch over the iron hook dangling just outside as he’d done so many times before.

He’d come this far. Even if the end was clouded once again by poisonous fog, he could go a ways further. He owed at least that to himself.

“Tenzo, hey! You were up there so long.”

Kakashi rushed from his hiding place as Kinoe crossed under the shadow of their tree-line.

“How are you? How was it? Are you okay? You changed clothes… Tenzo?

The brunette remained speechless, finding it impossible to look at the concerned shinobi, busying himself instead with finding the sight of his fluffy orange feline.

Fishcake emerged, immediately leaping up into his master’s open arms. It was only then that Kinoe managed to answer. “I don’t know if want to be called that anymore…”

Kakashi frowned, longing to draw in closer, yet held at bay by the new tension Kinoe brought back down with him.

“Tell me what happened?”

“I don’t know…”

“Your face is pale. I-I smell the faint trace of blood on you. Did, he hurt you?”

Losing a bit of his composure, Kakashi extended a hand to brush the back of Kinoe’s elbow.

“Hey, look at me… What happened up there?”

Fishcake touched his nose to his master’s, grateful to be snuggled close once more, and know know Kinoe was safe.

“I don’t know…”

“Did he hurt you?” The nin asked again.

When Kinoe glanced down onto his forearm with no answer, Kakashi nearly came undone.

“No… Are you alright? Let me see.”

He knelt the pair of them, gently peeling back Kinoe’s sleeve to see the small, but inflamed puncture wounds over his forearm.

“Why didn’t you call for me?”

Kinoe lifted his shoulders with no excuse.

“He just held on a little too intensely, that’s all...”

“He wouldn’t let you go? How did you get away? Please,” the shinobi urged. “Tell me what happened.”

At last, Kinoe managed to meet the focused and eye of Kakashi, burning into him.

“He said he loves me,” Kinoe started with a broken smile. “He was a cold as ever - terrifying - but, he said he grew to love me while he was caring for me, while he was trying to obtain the Wood Style. And, he did - he obtained it, I mean. He showed me.”

“He has Lord Hashirama’s power?” Kakashi interjected, horrified.

“Yes, apparently he gained it at the beginning, while I was still in my coma.”

“Did he explain the coma? Your hair? The flare ups of illness?”

Kinoe’s cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment.

“I-no… I was so caught up in everything else… Asking about all that didn’t even cross my mind…”

He shook it off.

“But, Kakashi, he obtained my mokuton, and he still kept me... he learned to love. He could barely even say it, but he did. It wasn’t a lie, at least, not all of it…”

“That’s wonderful,” Kakashi answered through a pained smile. He’d suffered through too much to fully trust Orochimaru’s confession just yet. “I’m sure that’s causing you difficulty about what you want to do next.”

Kinoe nodded.

“You came back down though, by yourself. He let you go?”

“He is giving me an hour to decide before he leaves for a new hiding place,” Kinoe explained, holding his breath a moment before cautiously adding, “If you’re going to apprehend him, this would be your opportunity.”

Kakashi furrowed his brow and ran his touch over the punctures in Kinoe’s forearm once more, allowing his other hand to cup the brunette’s cheek.

“Do you want me to apprehend him now?”

“I-You’ve hunted him for years…”

Kakashi met their foreheads searching for the depths of Kinoe’s true need and desire as the teen drew shallow, uneven breaths.

“That’s not most important right now. Come on, let’s get you away from here." Kakashi pulled the pair of them to their feet. “Are you alright running?”

“I don’t know, I had a bit of a flare up while I was up there, and I’m just so dazed still. It’s all so much… I’m sorry…”

“Don't be sorry. I can carry you on my back if that’s okay with you,” the shinobi offered. “We just need to move quickly in case he changes his mind about letting you go quietly. I’ll feel much better when we have you back inside city limits. Are you ready?”

Eyelashes fluttering against unwanted moisture, Kinoe opened his mouth to offer a weak stutter, looking to Fishcake, and then to the dark shadow of the tower, stretching out to reach him from beyond the field.

“I-I don’t know… I’m sorry… I am more unsure now than I have ever been before… I don’t know what decision to make. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what choice is right. He said he loved me. He grew to love me. He said- he said a lot of things…”

Kinoe tucked himself into Kakashi’s chest, drawing him closer despite how his father’s words screamed to push him away. With great urgency, he pressed his ear against the buckle of gray armor, searching for the steady, warmth of the shinobi’s heartbeat.

“I don’t know what life I want to choose. I don’t know who to trust.”

Breaking from his rigidness to be held, Kakashi’s arms slowly wrapped themselves around the small of Kinoe’s trembling waist, suddenly certain he’d found a puzzle piece that clasped perfectly against his body, and snapped the broken image of his life into completion.

“Tenzo-Kinoe,” He breathed, traces of him longing to never let go. “I know all of this has to be so overwhelming and paralyzing, and agonizing in a way I can not understand. But please, don’t allow your trust in me to waver now… We’ve come so far…”

He moved his touch to lift Kinoe’s chin and meet their eyes.

Defenseless and lost in a torrent of emotion he’d never dreamed he’d know, in complete surrender to emotion he’d sworn his soul from knowing, Kakashi found himself trying to confess, “I care so much for you… It’s barely been a few days, and yet, waiting for you to come down from that tower, I was beside myself…”

Tears slipped from Kinoe’s eyes, sliding silently down his cheeks.

“I want- I want you stay with me - but, I also want, more than that, I want you to be safe and happy… I want you to be free..."

He wanted to swell in these words, to accept them with open, welcome, elated arms, and still, Kinoe ground his teeth, sweet confessions from Kakashi spattered with blood from his father’s warnings and questions to ask of this shinobi to-good-to-be-true.

“Whatever you decide, wherever you go, I need you to know, I want you to trust, I-I… I truly-"

“Kakashi…” Kinoe interrupted, refusing to hear the words if they might somehow be a lie, and asking instead. “How did Rin die?”

Kakashi’s eye fluttered in the shock of such a question at such a time. Embarrassment splashed his cheeks and chest red, dread swirling his stomach as he loosened his grasp and allowed the space between them to grow.

“What?”

“Rin… How did she die? I have to know…”

The shinobi swallowed against his own disgrace, mumbling low and aching, “It seems you already know…”

Their embrace dissolved, Kinoe taking a step back, hands covering his mouth as he shook his head. Fishcake, back at his feet, meowed in uneasy confusion.

“And your sensei? You stayed behind to watch from the Village while he fought the Nine-Tailed Beast and died, alongside his wife?”

The spark that had at last relit through Kakashi’s dark eye dimmed down to nothing. He stood, raw and defeated, at an all new form of loss before this young man who had stolen into his heart.

“What else did he tell you?”

“That your father killed himself because of the shame he endured from the Village for abandoning a mission to save a teammate…”

“And?”

“And that that red eye of yours is a Sharingan that once belonged to your teammate Obito, and that you acquired it after Obito disobeyed your orders on a mission not to go back to rescue a kidnapped teammate. That he went alone to save her, and that you arrived to see him killed and to take his eye…”

“And?”

“There’s more?”

“What did he call me?” Kakashi demanded, the edge of hysterical grief breaking through his voice.

Kinoe paused, not wanting to say the words, not wanting to make them real.

“Cold-blooded, Friend-Killer Kakashi…”

Kakashi exhaled a whimper, struck deep with the twisting knife that was that name.

“It feels worse to hear you say it than I imagined it would…”

“Kakashi!” Kinoe exclaimed. “Is it true? You have to tell me that he was lying - that what respect I have for you is earned - that you didn’t - that you would never… That’s not your name!”

“It is, Kinoe…” Kakashi admitted, eye distant, burdened with unbearable guilt. “It is my name. It is my legend. It’s true, all of it.”

The shinobi turned away, unable to look any longer as disappointment and horror contorted Kinoe’s tear-stricken face. He cast his gaze instead, into the past, slowly explaining, painfully reliving...

“My father was a war hero. Celebrated in the Leaf Village, feared internationally. He did abandon a mission to go back and try to rescue a teammate. The mission failed, and he was shunned. A disgrace. It drove him to take his own life. It left me an orphan, and it sent me spiraling into a heartless legality for ancient shinobi law. Never show your feelings. Never let them compromise a mission. Effectiveness. Rules. If my father’s shame was greater than his love for me, then I would be positive to bear neither. I excelled to the top of my class. I became a child Jonin. I endured the horrors of war as a child Captain. I lead a team of my school mates into the battlefield, and when Rin was taken in the midst of our missive and  
Obitio defied me as his captain to retrieve her, I let him go alone.”

Kakashi paused a moment, regret nearly overwhelming him yet again for his naive misjudgment.

“Before he left however, he said something… He told me he thought my father was admirable for what he did, that it was wrong for him to have been shamed and treated as scum. And then he said, as I have told you before - ‘Those that break the rules and regulations are scum. But those who abandon their friends are even worse than scum’…”

The phrase echoed of memory, Kakashi telling him before at the start of their whole adventure. It’d been his reason for taking Kinoe with him in the first place. The cornerstone of his life.

“I followed after him. In time to get my eye cut through, in time to rescue Rin, and begin an escape. And then, _he_ made it in time, to push me out of the way, and take my place beneath a falling heap of rocks as our enemies brought down the cave in which we’d fought on top of us.”

Kakashi pressed a hand over his covered eye.

“Obito passed on to me the only intact piece of himself left, this eye, as a gift with which to see a rich and full life for him… His loss both destroyed and rebuilt me…”

His hand dropped, and Kakashi managed to glance back to Kinoe.

“These incidents were the ones to reshape the Leaf Village… It is what drove Minato Sensei to make the changes he did when he became Hokage. Setting age restrictions for young children that wanted to apply to be a shinobi, to take the Chunnin Exams, the Jonin Exams… No more children to war, or leading on the battlefield - no matter their talent. More of an emphasis on teamwork taught and praised amongst shionbi. The Memorial Festival was started. Health centers for shinobi coping with PTSD were opened. Orphanages for were redesigned and finally given proper funding. A headstone was erected in my father’s honor, for the life he led, and for valuing his teammates above all else. These efforts were the only thing that kept me from my Hokage’s side as he faced the Nine-Tails. He ordered me to stay back, to evacuate and protect the Village...to play my role, while he fulfilled his. I still regret that obedience…”

“And Rin…?”

His eye left again, down to his feet.

“And Rin…” he whispered. “I’d swore to Obito that I’d protect her…”

Kinoe drew a step closer.

“Then why…?”

“Because…” Kakashi started, pulling the word up from his broken soul, forcing the rest of his confession out after it. “Again, I was not fast enough when it mattered most… Invaders had come, kidnapped her, taken her to Kirigakure. I wasn’t by her side, nor was I able to reach her before they turned her into a jinchuuriki, a human host to the Three Tailed-Beast. I  
tracked her down, I tried to rescue her and bring her home... But, I was not fast enough coming up with a plan to save her and the village after I’d retrieved her and she told me what had happened, that she couldn’t return to the village, that she was going to be used as a weapon against her own people… She begged me to kill her. I refused. Teamwork above the mission. My promise to Obito. Rin, my Rin…”

He looked to his hand, flexing trembling fingers into a fist.

“And then, I was not fast enough when she leapt in between our pursuers and my lightning blade… She met our eyes. She whispered my name. And her heart burst inside my palm.”

Kinoe silently breathed out Kakashi’s name, images flashing once more through his mind, clarified and crushing, of Kakashi in a panic, hands in the sink, frantic to wash away the blood, pushing Kinoe away in the sure belief that he was dangerous. Kakashi relived memory flashes far more vivid in his own mind.

“The story of why Rin truly died was swept away in an effort to avoid falling into another war. I bore the whispers and the rumors, and forever the name, Cold-Blooded, Friend-Killer Kakashi… and I carry the guilt, that the name truly does, rightfully belong to me…”

Kinoe released a held breath, opening his hands at his sides.

“I want to believe you…”

“But you don’t think you can…” Kakashi finished for him.

“I don’t know… I want to so badly… You both… you paint such convincing worlds…” Kinoe warred with himself. “He was wicked and grew to love me and wants to be with me and protect me above all else. You have endured the brutality of the shinobi world and it’s horror, but also its change and growth, and you want to make things better, and you care about me, and you think I’m worth saving, and I even thought you might… And now, I’m not even sure if either one of these stories in which you’ve invited me to live can even be real.”

The two found themselves inching inward once more, pulled toward each other’s comfort past their conscious knowledge.

“Kinoe… I don’t know what else to do… I can’t and I don’t want to force you to do anything. I too want to believe that Lord Orochimaru has had a change of heart - I think if anyone could soften that monster it could be you… You _are_ worth saving… And I- you thought that I might- and… I… I wasn’t trying to lie to you or keep you in the dark. The truths that Lord Orochimaru revealed to you, that he twisted as a weapon against me more than they already soak my hands with blood, they are truths that I can hardly admit to myself. I’m sure I would have told you in time- hell, I’ve told you more and been more vulnerable with you in the past few days than I have with anyone since I was a child… Please... I just want what is best for you... but I meant what I said before, can’t make that decision for you. You have to be the one. And I don’t say that from a place of pressure, but, I guess from a place of wanting you to realize that you do have the freedom to choose.”

The gentle swipe of the nin’s thumb wiped the teen’s face dry, Kinoe catching the gloved hand before it could fall, and pressing it to his cheek, eyes closing.

“Kakashi, I-"

“Captain!” A voice from behind interrupted with a boom. In an instant, Kakashi swept Fishcake and Kinoe behind his protective stance.

“We arrived as quickly as we could.”

From the dark emerged half a dozen ninja. Among the shinobi bearing porcelain masks as Kakashi had worn the night he crept into the tower, were Asuma, Kurenai and Gai.

“Is Lord Orochimaru still in the area?” Asuma asked.

Kakashi’s eye narrowed, Kinoe’s body tensing behind him.

This was it. His father had been right. Back-up had come to apprehend him.

“That’s not our first order of business,” Kakashi answered firmly. “Kinoe needs medical attention. His forearm. Small wounds, but they need to be checked traces of poison.”

“Surely, it can wait,” Kurenai insisted. “If Lord Orochimaru is truly here, we need to act now. Lord Third cleared assassination on sight, there’s no need to apprehend.”

“You brought this situation to the attention of Lord Third?”

“Lord Third has had you leading us on this mission for years, of course we reported. There’s no time to waste. We need to move into position now.”

The gears in his mind working overtime, Kakashi remained silent, lifting his hitai-ate and letting the red of his Sharingan gleam through the dark over his comrades.

“Captain, we need your-"

“Never once have you referred to me as Captain, Kurenai,” Kakashi pointed out, his voice calculated and suspicious, as if laying his footing through a minefield. “‘Smart-ass,’ ‘idiot,’ ‘pervert,’ but never, not even in congratulations to me when I earned the title, have you called me ‘Captain,’ nor have I been assigned over you for a mission… Who are you?“

Kinoe snapped his eyes to try and catch Kakashi’s, and then back to the shinobi before him. They were identical to the ninja he’d met in the village. Appearance. Voice. Identical.

“Cut the act, Captain Kakashi,” Asuma interjected. “The bargaining chip is secure. We need your orders to move on on Lord Orochimaru.”

Kinoe’s heart leapt into his throat, his body heating with a panic. Bargaining chip. They’d called him the bargaining chip. He took a step back from Kakashi.

“Who are you?” Kakashi repeated, this time a pair of kunai flying out of his sleeves and into his grasp.

“Enough, Kakashi! We’ve hunted this bastard for too long to let him get away now.”

“I will not ask again!”

Static screamed through Kinoe’s mind. His father had been right. It’d been a lie. It’d been a rouse.

Then, he remembered the earnest burn through Kakashi’s eyes into his, the feel of his heart against his ear. Why was he guarding him? Why would he play the part this far?

The shinobi across from them drew their own weapons, bodies tensing to spring.

“They’ve increased the bounty - I’m not missing my shot at him, but we need all of us. Bind your little pet and - _hey_!”

Kinoe no longer allowed the barrage of conflicting thoughts to rob him of control, and, snatching up Fishcake, tore away from Kakashi and the others, into the dark, thick of forrest cover. He wouldn’t allow himself to be bound. He wouldn’t allow himself to be caught in any more lies. No more. He would run, as far as his feet would take him. He and Fishcake would start anew. No one to hold them captive. No one to manipulate their hearts.

Knowing Kakashi’s ninken where surely on patrol between the shadows and brush, Kinoe set Fishcake between his shoulders, dipped his torso downward, and sped forward as arrowhead, cutting through the night, arms flying loose behind him.

The light patter of speeding footsteps prickled against Kinoe’s over-stimulated senses, sending a terrified chill down his spine.

“There’s no use in running, you pathetic child!”

Kinoe ground his teeth, willing adrenaline to speed up his screaming legs.

But, there, in front of him, in a sudden burst of green, Gai stood, posed to fight.

The world spun in a relentless rush around Kinoe, as he came to a halt, his feet now stuck in their panic, like bare skin to fresh ice. He nearly surrendered there between the frantic heaves of his chest, until the clench of Fishcake's claws plunged him back into action.

No. He’d been a prisoner too long. He was too close to freedom to give it up without a fight - even if that fight would be against the one known as the Mighty Blue Beast.

Kinoe removed the terrified feline from his shoulders, shooing him with urgent, indisputable affection to find cover, and then, he stood, shoulders squared and chest puffed, to face his opponent.

“Come on then.”

A smirk cracked between Gai’s lips, but before he charged inward, it struck Kinoe just how odd the shinobi was posed for their duel - not at all like he had readied to fight Kakashi.

Kinoe tried to shake the thought, and focus in on the flurry of taijutstu coming towards him.

He countered best as he could, holding his own better than he’d imagined against the Blue Beast. It was odd. Something in Gai’s movements felt wrong, very unlike him. He did not move wild and uninhibited as he had in his sparring with Kakashi. This fight he seemed far more calculated, and to Kinoe, much like fighting his own clone back in the tower.

Perhaps the nin was taking on a different method for a different opponent, or perhaps there had been a reason to trust Kakashi’s vehement demands that the shinobi that had arrived were in fact not who they claimed themselves to be.

A fist came crashing against the teen’s ribs, knocking breath and saliva from his open mouth, and sending him toppling backwards into the dirt. With barely enough time to recover, Gai’s foot came crashing into the earth where his opponent lay. Kinoe scrambled to his feet, just missing the heavy blow, deciding quickly to move from defense into offense. He leapt backward, forming seals as his body flipped through the air, and then, called forth a forrest of his own in retaliation.

The jump-suited nin nimbly avoided the strike and grasp of each branch and vine surging toward him, nearly escaping the attack completely, until finding his foot twisted in an unnoticed loop of gnarled vine.

Kinoe’s heart leapt, and he yanked the shinobi toward him, retracting the vine through his palm as Gai struggled much unlike the proud shinobi he’d known him to be in combat.

From his free hand, Kinoe formed, as Orochimaru had before, a long wooden staff, his however, pointing into a spear at the top.

The teen drew a sharp breath, refusing to close his eyes as he raised the weapon and let it fly. Gai twisted his body from direct impact, unable to avoid the spear entirely, and crying out in a hissing howl as it ripped open the side of his stomach. Between torn flesh and fabric, no blood poured. Instead, to Kinoe’s shock and disgust, the area of Gai’s wound, clothing, skin and all, faded into a sickly white color.

“Who - what are you?”

The being writhed as his body continued to transform, the whole of it turning white and reforming, contorting as if clay under the hand of a careless artist, into a human altogether new. Skin of porcelain, eyes of wicked, gleaming yellow, the naked creature turned wailing into laughter.

Most disturbing, however, was the black mark clearly etched into the creature’s shoulder. it was the symbol Kinoe had grown up seeing above his door frames and mantle, the symbol he’d believed to be the mark of his fallen clan - the symbol of Lord Orochimaru.

Fighting the urge to wretch, Kinoe yanked his binding vine closer and declared, full of confidence and rage, “This isn’t loving me at all! You haven’t changed your ways at all!”

The creature’s wheezed laughter ceased, a smirk overtaking his face and too-wide mouth as he sneered, his pierced side crumbling into shattered chunks, “He can’t hear you through me…”

Before the being could blink, Kinoe loomed over him, spear redrawn and primed for fatality.

“Then I will go and tell him myself.”

Kinoe reared back, crying out into the night as he plunged this spear through the creature’s chest and into the ground.

Immediately, he was thrown backward in an explosion of wood and root. Bursting forth from the creature’s hollow form, a tree rapidly growing up and outward into sky and earth.

Kinoe’s chest heaved, eyes wild and breath ragged. Within an instant, Fishcake leapt down from his cover and was at his master’s side.

“Fishcake...”

Pulling the tabby close, Kinoe shook his head free of the shock.

That being had not been Gai at all. None of those shinobi where truly themselves. They were some creation of his father. In this realization, Kinoe’s body ached with every memory of blood, marrow, and flesh stolen from his body in the name of finding a cure. These beings, these creatures, whatever they were, were imbued with his life, his cells, and his strength. They’d been sent to complete his father’s manipulation and to bring Kinoe back home - whether by his own choice in fear, or by force.

“Kinoe!” Kakashi’s call rang through the dark, startling the teen to his feet.

“Kakashi!”

“Kinoe, run! They aren’t really themselves! They’re-"

“My father’s creations,” Kinoe finished.

Kakashi stilled, eye’s darting from Kinoe, to Fishcake, and then over the broken remains of a white body with the trunk of a large tree sprouting forth.

“You’re okay?”

Kinoe nodded.

“Yes, and you got away?”

“I’m not really here. I mean, I’m a shadow clone. The real me is back taking them out and holding them off. I’m here to escort you out of here as quickly as possible.”

Snatching Kinoe’s hand, the nin started to pull away for an escape.

“No, wait! Kakashi,” Kinoe protested, holding his ground. “Don’t divide your strength to escort me. I want to go back and help you stop them.”

“Kinoe, no!”

“My father sent them! My father - that man - that _snake_! He made them with pieces of me - and he sent them to make me his prisoner, again! I don’t care what he calls it any more. It is not love - it is not protection - and I will not let him hurt you!”

Kinoe gasped, astonished and overwhelmed, as Kakashi’s masked lips pressed against his forehead.

“Again, I’m so sorry, Kinoe... I know you’re strong enough to help and hold your own, but I’d much rather get you to safety than have you come and fight right now.”

Held in between the men’s embrace, Fishcake’s mouth twitched a bit, neck retracting into itself.

Kakashi paid no mind, smiling gently instead at the fiery concern Kinoe held for him.

“There were five of those things that stayed to face you…”

Letting out an amused hum, Kakashi smoothly assured, “I’ve handled far more than five at once with no problem. Don’t worry about me. We need to run ahead now. My real self has everything back there completely under-"

Before he could finish, Kakashi’s shadow clone vanished into a cloud of white smoke with a pop. The jutsu had released. Something on Kakashi’s battlefield had caused him a loss of chakra control.

“Cocky ass…” Kinoe growled in distressed frustration. “Fishcake, I’m sorry to do this, but I need you to stay hidden here. I’m going back.”

The tabby hissed at this new plan, his master ignoring him.

“We only saw six of those creatures before, but they can shape-shift, and who knows if there were more that we don’t know about. Don’t come out of hiding unless you see me and I’m able to tell you the name of the old lady innkeeper from the village, okay? Those things shouldn’t have that knowledge.”

Again, Fishcake meowed low and clung hard into his master’s skin.

“He needs me. But, I can't have anything happening to you. So please, stay here. I'll be back - I promise,”

Kinoe tore through the night, weaving through trees, leaping over bush and brush. In the distance, the glow of blue light darted in electric ferocity. The teen felt a sudden static raise the hair over his arms as a gurgled cry rang out and the blue light vanished. Kakashi wasn’t holding anything back.

As he arrived, Kinoe tucked himself into the shadows, observing the scene before him. Two of the creatures remained, Kakashi having already eliminated three of the five that had remained behind with him. The shinobi engaged both creatures, the three of them a blur of intricate taijutsu. Taking a focused double-take, Kinoe confirmed the sight of one kunai tightly in the nin’s grip, and another lodged in his shoulder. He flexed sweaty fists, desperate for an opening to jump in and provide aid.

The opportunity arose quickly after as the creatures, in wordless coordination, each sent huge, full kicks through the air at their opponent, one flying high, and the other sweeping low. The nin, tucking his arms in against his chest, gave a short leap upward, twisting his body through the air to rotate in the minuscule opening left between both blows. Landing nimbly on his toes and hands, Kakashi sent his own foot flying, striking the one of the creatures to tumble backward.

Kinoe seized the moment without hesitation, charging onto the battlefield and reengaging the fallen creature, freeing Kakashi to fight one on one.

“I’m your opponent now.”

“Kinoe!” Kakashi cried. “You’re supposed to be going back to the village!”

“Shut up and focus!”

Kakashi caught the hands coming for him, twisting them in his grasp against the grinning creature over him. With his hands occupied, the nin took the opportunity to yank the kunai from his shoulder with his teeth, and swing the blade between masked lips to slice across his enemy’s eyes. Their hold released as the creature fell backward, hands clasped to his fresh wound. Again, no blood was to pour out from the damage, his body, instead contorting into a new form entirely.

Kinoe’s cry pulled Kakashi’s eyes away from landing a finishing blow.

The teen struggled as his own enemy held him from behind, its arms hooked underneath Kinoe’s, hand pressing against the back of his skull.

“Kinoe!”

“Kakashi! Behind you!”

The nin turned just in time to see the impossible. Over his shoulder, rising from the dirt, the small, fearsome form of Rin, brandishing Kakashi’s blade, aimed to run his neck through.

Stunned, Kakashi raised his arms to shield the blow, unable to make himself dodge or counterstrike. Fresh blood soaking his torn sleeves and skin, the shinobi gaped at the sight.

“Rin…”

She chuckled, pulling up to her feet, neck breaking to the side and sending her head to loll over in a heavy, flaccid hang. Her face bore Kakashi's mark through her eyes, the false flesh cracking and crumbling around it, and her mouth dripped of fake blood. Worst however, was revealed as she turned her chest to her opponents, proudly presenting an enormous, gaping hole through her chest drenched in crimson ooze.

“Kakashi…” She squeaked, smiling. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

Kinoe writhed against his captor’s hold.

“It’s not real Kakashi! It’s not-she’s not- You have to snap out of it and bring that thing down!”

The nin stayed frozen in place.

“Kakashi,” she repeated, taking slow, stumbled steps. “You aren’t going to hurt me anymore, are you?”

“Kakashi! It’s not her!”

“But it could be me,” she countered, body morphing again. This time, her form grew, expanding until her shattered eye-line met with Kakashi’s and she matched the shinobi’s age, blood gone and body whole. Aside from the spreading cracks across her face, she stood, the perfect image of a Rin grown up.

“Take me back to the village instead. Let us have him, and you can have me again.”

Kakashi’s eyelids beat against tears, blue lighting consuming his hand in a sudden, explosive crackle.

The Rin’s expression fell, a piece of her cheek falling into the grass.

“You finally get to see me, after all this time, and you would kill me again?”

“Rin…” Kakashi whimpered. “I’m so sorry…”

A scowl overtook her, face cracking apart more and more with each movement.

“Fine then! Do it!”

Red rushed out from the sides of her mouth again, the fake blood wetting her chest and spreading outward as the opening reformed through her chest.

“Do it again, Friend-Killer!”

Kinoe wrestled harder against creature laughing into his ear, screaming as Kakashi’s lightning blade fizzled into nothing.

“Come on! Cold-blooded! Murderer!”

She surged forward, spitting into Kakashi’s face, raising the kunai she’d stolen, readying a fatal strike against the helpless nin.

“Kakashi!”

Her blade swung, a streak of silver darting though black, Kakashi unmoving, gasping in stunned agony, as it the kunai plunged deep into the flash of orange that threw itself in front of him.

The forest fell silent for the echoing thud of Fishcake’s limp body against the dirt.

Inhaling sharp, Kinoe released a cry that shattered the stillness around them, rattling his bones, and shooting out from his back a barrage of wooden spikes to skewer through the creature holding him. He tore away, propelled by the eruption of the body behind him into the growth of a tree, scrambling through what felt like the stand still of time, all matter of moisture streaking his face as he pulled himself through the nightmare.

Kakashi’s eyes snapped upward from the tabby’s bleeding body, locking onto the creature with the audacity to commit such atrocities. He caught the secondary blow flying for him, lighting up his hand to explode lightning against the one in his grasp.

Sliding between them, Kinoe snatched up the body of his beloved pet, retreating as fast as he could, as Kakashi’s grasp clasped around the creature’s remaining wrist. In a final swoop, the shinobi ran his Chidori through the near perfect recreation of darling Nohara Rin. The form broke apart, stretching upward into branches and bark, and at the same time, cracking a fresh break through Kakashi’s scarred, fragile heart.

The ring in his ears fading, and the world slowing its spin, Kakashi looked over to Kinoe as he wept and begged over Fishcake's body.

Another beloved life that had thrown itself in front of him.

“Please! You can’t - you can’t… I need you… You were supposed to stay hidden! Why didn’t you stay hidden?”

The cat cast his eyes up to his master as if to say that he himself hadn’t stayed behind when he’d been ordered to, by Kakashi.

“He’s still breathing,” Kakashi observed, kneeling beside them. “I’m going to take a look, okay?”

“Kakashi, please…”

“Medical ninjutsu could save him, but he’d need to hang on until back up arrives. That is, assuming those things didn’t intercept and incapacitate our backup… I’m sorry, I’m not  
proficient at all in medical ninjutsu…”

“There has to be something we can do!”

Fishcake offered a weak, pained meow. Slowly, with the last of his strength, he looked to Kakashi, extending a shaking paw and placing it on his master’s knee. He nodded to the shinobi, entrusting his precious Kinoe into his hands from now on.

“Fishcake… Why… You can’t… I’m not…” Kakashi stammered, body shaking against a full panic. He sucked in a strained breath. “Kinoe, I have an idea. It might be crazy, and it might come with great risk to you, but-"

“What is it?” Kinoe demanded.

“I’ve had a theory I’ve been mulling over a while now… The reason Lord Orochimaru has lived so long and not aged. The reason for your flare ups.”

“Kakashi-there’s no time! What is it?”

“Your h-"

“Hair…” Kinoe finished. “My hair…”

He wanted to laugh, to sob, to lose himself in the realization, in how ignorant he’d been, in this final puzzle piece that brought all things finally, finally into perspective and truth. But, Fishcake was on his last breath, and he’d been right when he’d said it to Kakashi - there wasn’t time.

Pulling an armful of his hair around into his lap, Kinoe carefully lifted Fishcake’s body and wrapped it in the dirty, tangled mess.

Instantly, Kinoe felt the familiar flare of what had been called “illness” through his body. Black spots clouded his vision, and swayed him around the edges of consciousness. His mouth parted, lungs parched for oxygen, muscles screaming for the strength to hold himself upright. And then, just as all was to go dark, Fishcake stirred, eyes sparking of new life.  
“Fishcake…”

The feline meowed, happily, but full of concern, nuzzling his head against Kinoe’s pale, sallow cheek. He shook free of the brown tresses, the only damage to his body now being the matting of blood into his fur.

Kakashi caught Kinoe’s body as it fell, void of all strength.

Together, the three huddled together, taking pause to process all that had just been, and all that it ultimately meant.

“This was it all along… My hair…”

Kinoe’s voice, ragged and flat, named the terrible truth in a whisper.

“He took the mokuton… And then…”

 

_“And then, somehow, extracting Lord Hashirama’s power, nurturing you in order to keep you alive long enough to get what I wanted... I discovered something... a warmth, bright and incredible through my body... revitalizing, invigorating... Something to shift my perspective on my mortal life... something I needed more than any power I’d sought after before...”_

“He discovered something more… His key to endless youth…”

“Kinoe, you need to rest.”

“He told me I was ill to cover up the life he’d steal from me… He wasn’t ever looking for a cure… He only ever wanted to use me for his own selfish, sick gain…”

“Kinoe…”

“He never loved me, and he never will…”

“We need to get you back to the Village. You need immediate medical attention.”

“No.”

“Kinoe-"

“No!”

The brunette turned, looking upward into Kakashi’s mismatched eyes, Fishcake warm in his arms.

“I am Tenzo, and we are going to apprehend that wicked monster right now.”


	8. Chapter 8

Tenzo darted through the dark, Kakashi just a stride ahead of him, off his shoulder. Together, the pair sped over open, dewy grass, focused, determined, leaving all that they’d been through before behind them as they approached the tower’s growing silhouette to claim the villain inside. Tenzo’s mind fought against panic, trying only to focus on what needed to be done, and Kakashi’s hitai-ate tied around the top of his weighty, flopping, re-braided hair.

Fifty yards away and Kakashi began weaving signs, his hands clasping together, and igniting of screaming blue.

“Now!”

Tenzo knelt, Kakashi running ahead, leaping, and dropping into a squat. He braced himself as Tenzo shouted, “Mokuton!”

Up from the ground, underneath Kakashi’s feet, shot a large trunk of wood, launching the shinobi forward, through the air, a missile of lightning headed straight for Orochimaru’s tower. The two collided with a cry from the nin, clouds of dust and spray of stone exploded with a boom. Kakashi slid into the grass below. The tower shuttered and groaned, hanging still then for a moment before it swayed, tilting slightly backward, and then careened down to crash against the earth.

The long body of the tower lay in broken pieces over the field, the bulb that was its small housing at the top, smashed on its side. Torn off and buried deep, Tenzo noticed with a victorious smile, was the large iron hook that had hung outside his window for so long.

It was really happening. They’d brought the wretched tower down.

From within the wreckage, something began to shift. The dark body of a snake twisted beneath a pile of rubble, and Tenzo held his breath, understanding. Orochimaru had summoned that creature to climb inside, to use as a living shield for the fall of the tower.

“Steady…” Kakashi eased.

Suddenly, a blade pierced upward, through green-gray scales. Following the blade, the sticky, slimy hands of Orochimaru. They pulled against the opening, ripping the snake’s flesh open wide enough for Orochimaru’s body to emerge, a devilish chuckle already rumbling out of him.

“My, my, what a feat,” he acknowledged, stepping free of the the snake’s corpse, dripping of slimy ooze. “You’ve genuinely surprised me. Truly, I’ve underestimated you, Kakashi. Shame that your prowess is about to meet its end.”

He licked his lips with a tongue all too long.

“Lord Orochimaru, rogue ninja of The Hidden Leaf Village,” Kakashi started, ignoring the snake’s taunts and carrying on with practiced confidence. “By order of the Feudal Lords, and the Hokage, Sarutobi the Third, I hereby order your immediate surrender and capture. Judgement for you will wait until you’ve been officially charged for your crimes back within Village limits. However, immediate judgement will come certain and swift should you refuse to come quietly.”

A sinister laughter answered him.

“Quite sure of yourself, aren't you? Couldn’t even wait for your back-up to arrive? Or was it that incessant itch to throw yourself at death that had you charge out here so recklessly.”

“It was me,” Tenzo declared, demanding his kidnapper's attention. “I demanded we act now.”

“Ah, Kinoe... Still choosing to remain in the dark about your precious shinobi and his own wicked crimes?”

“That’s not my name.”

Tenzo's eyes narrowed, posture tall and voice steady, despite the shaking of his hands, and the frantic frenzy in his chest.

“And I know everything I need to know.”

He swallowed, pausing a moment, hanging on the edge of all he'd wanted to say.

“I know how you twist, and twist, and _ruin_ truth for your own gain. To keep me. To control me.”

Kakashi drew slow, silent steps to stand just off the side of, and behind Tenzo.

“I know now that I have only ever been your prisoner and tool. That you have seen me only as a means to eternal youth. Use me. Drain me. Tell me I’m ill. Tell me I’m weak. Tell me you’re looking for a cure. Tell me I’m in the tower for my safety. Tell me the shinobi are vile and evil.”

The dam at last burst, and Tenzo let the flood surge free.

“ _You_ are the shinobi you told me they were! _You_ are the greedy, ruthless, soulless monster! _You_ are the master manipulator! _You_ are the snake in the grass! I am finally, _finally_ out of the dark - and your reign has ended.”

Orochimaru shook his head. 

“Oh, Kinoe, naive as ever…Don’t you remember what I told you before you left the tower?” The snake continued, relishing as the Tenzo’s cheeks lit, mortified. “You will _always_ be _mine_.”

Kakashi’s knees dipped, readying for an impossibly fast leap into action, and tightening the focus of his revealed Sharingan on Orochimaru as he continued on. 

“Come with me now, and I will leave Kakashi unharmed… You wouldn't want to hurt your precious savior, would you? You don't want his blood on your hands, do you? But, come with me now, Kinoe, and none of it will be necessary.”

Knife in his throat, Tenzo twitched his lips around an open mouth, startled then, when Kakashi strode in front, calmly declaring war.

“Immediate judgement, then.”

Temper flared the slitted nostrils of Lord Orochimaru, pulling at his upper lip with a growl as he shed his outer cloak and accepted.

“So it would seem...”

 

* * *

 

_“You can’t be serious. Look at yourself.”_

_Kinoe gasped against the complete depletion of his body, trying to decipher which of the three Kakashis he was seeing was the real one and meet his eye contact._

_“He gave me an hour. It’s been, at the very least, forty minutes. We have to act right now if we have any hope at catching him… Um, in my satchel, there’s a parcel… Please?”_

_Obliging immediately, Kakashi reached down, digging through small satchel Kinoe had hastily packed before leaving the tower. The shinobi procured the parcel, pulling out a chakra tea bag, that Kinoe shoved behind parched lips and aching teeth._

_“Give me a moment with this and I’ll be back on my feet.”_

_“I meant what I said before; Orochimaru is not what is most important right now. We are in no fit condition to even pursue, much less engage an immortal master of jutsu! We need to retreat.”_

_“We_ need _to catch that bastard now!” Kinoe insisted, a bit of his voice coming back._

_From his master’s lap, Fishcake meowed in solidarity._

_“Listen, I know you’re both extremely upset, and you should be, I am as well, but-"_

_“How many years have you hunted this man?” Kinoe petitioned. “How long has this been your mission?”_

_The nin paused, shaking his head._

_“It doesn’t matter.”_

_“It does!” Kinoe insisted, adrenaline pumping spirit and strength through his veins. “All of those years, I was his prisoner. I was used, and I suffered without understanding or hope! In that time, who knows what other atrocities he committed? How many lives were lost in his lust for power? Who knows what he will do if he gets away now…”_

_Instinctively, Kinoe’s arms tightened around Fishcake, as he stated bluntly what Kakashi already knew and feared._

_“He will come to reclaim me. He will come for The Village. He won’t stop the slaughter. You do not need to feel any guilt for the time that you were looking and he was not found, but I do think there would be fair guilt to be had, to know he was within grasp and allowed to escape unchallenged. I cannot bear that guilt, Kakashi.”_

_The nin’s face hardened, eye pleading for the darling young man in his arms to understand._

_“And I cannot lead us into battle knowing it is a death sentence.”_

_“This advice from_ you _?” Kinoe snapped. Struggling, he pulled away and up to his feet, Fishcake still tucked tight against his chest. “What happened to your dream of dying for your comrades?”_

_“Die_ for _them, not beside them when they’ve given their life by my order!”_

_“What does that even mean? You just forsake your mission now, when it matters most?”_

_Kakashi stood, lost to his unrestrained passions._

_“Yes! Teamwork before the mission! I am my father’s son! I have done nothing but forsake my mission from the moment I saw you up in that damned tower - and I will forsake every last one if it means you are safe!”_

_Kinoe froze. His vision stilled enough to bring the sight of three Kakashis into the one actually standing before him, frantic and fearful._

_“I have lead too many comrades into battle to have them die under my command! I have lost too many precious people - I cannot lose you too, Tenzo!”_

_His voice broke under the weight of emotion, and in the brief silence that followed Kakashi ran a sweaty hand through messy silver, shaking his head as he turned away._

_“Of course I want to apprehend him. It has been my greatest desire for so long… I worked so hard to follow him and find him. I know what he’s capable of - what might happen if he gets away now… And what he did to you… I_ need _to bring him to justice…”_

_Turning back to Tenzo, eye pleading, Kakashi confessed, “But, I need your safety more… I cannot lead you to your death…”_

_Fishcake leapt down from his master’s grasp, crossing over to nuzzle and curl gratefully against the nin’s shins. The feline turned then, watching Tenzo cross shakily over, too, and place steadying hands against Kakashi’s chest._

_“Kakashi,” he breathed, deeply touched. “Would you go after him, if I weren’t with you now?”_

_Slowly, the nin nodded._

_“It’s only that you don’t want to be the one to put my life on the line? That you want to keep me safe?”_

_He nodded again, this time his forehead touching down onto Kinoe’s._

_“Was your promise that I had a choice in this life a lie, too, then?”_

_Kakashi’s eye shot open, struck breathless with the extreme weight of such a simple question._

_“I don’t want safety any more, Kakashi… I want freedom… I would think you, above all else, would understand the need to fight, even if it risks my life… Will you let me truly have the freedom to choose?”_

_“Tenzo... Of course I will.”_

_“Then this is what I choose,” Kinoe declared with finality. “It's not your orders. It's not your call. It's my choice. I want to fight for my Village. I want give everything I have to protect my precious people. I want to be worthy of the legacy I was entrusted by my clan, my mother, Lord Hashirama...”_

_Leaning back, Kakashi smiled slightly under his mask, pride swelling though this wild apprehension. He reached a hand upward, pulling off his hitai-ate. Kinoe’s eyes fluttered as the shinobi retied the simple fabric strip, marked with its metal insignia, at the crown of his head._

_“Okay, then,” Kakashi ratified._

_Though his body still lacked in strength, the brunette held his head higher than he ever had before, bursting of confidence and life, completely sure of who he was._

_Kakashi’s smile grew, knowing and saying the truth out loud for the both of them._

_“Tenzo, shinobi of The Leaf Village”_

* * *

 

Tenzo flexed his hands into fists, willing his fear and rage into adrenaline, and that adrenaline into focus and strength.

Orochimaru’s hands flew fast, sign after sign, before slamming into the grass with a shout.

“Kuchiyose no Jutsu!"

In an enormous, billowing cloud, appeared a mass of white scales, rising upward and spitting into a colossal, eight-headed serpent, mouths wide, and fangs primed. The beast threw its heads back, letting out an ear-splitting hiss that shook the forrest around them.

Tenzo nearly fell to his knees, gaping in horrified awe, the only thought that he could manage being, “Monstrosity…”

_"_ Stay sharp,” Kakashi ordered from his side. “I need my partner here if we’re going to bring this guy down.”

Tenzo managed to pull his stare away and glance to the shinobi smirking at him.

“Give me a lift?”

Swallowing, Tenzo offered a short nod.

“Thank you, Princess. Watch your back for the real monster, the snake that did the summoning.”

At this warning, Tenzo realized Orochimaru had vanished, phasing though the ground as if intangible. He wove his own hand signs as Kakashi sprung into action, and sprouted, up from the ground, a series of wooden beams, growing taller one after the other.

Kakashi nimbly leapt up the beams, using them as stairs to better reach eye contact with the eight-headed beast raging and snapping its fangs every which way. Drawing his hands together, the shinobi lit up lighting once more as he took a soaring, last leap from from Tenzo’s highest beam. As he began the arc of his fall, Kakashi leaned into a dive, crackling arms outstretched above his head. His body twisted mid-air until, spinning fast and furious, he became a bolt of lightning that cut through three of the monster’s heads with a great splatter of blood.

The red rained down briefly over the field as enormous white heads crashed into the grass, mouths and yellow eyes open wide. The snake wailed in pain and rage, and Kakashi, still tumbling through the air, began to weave new signs for a secondary blow.

The nin straightened, facing the snake once more while straining against the pull of gravity. As soon as his feet met the extended reach of Tenzo’s growing trunk from beneath him, Kakashi let loose from his masked lips, a fire-ball jutsu so grand that it captured two more of the great snake’s frenzied heads.

The beast writhed against the burn. Tenzo wasted no time, bring up from the earth masses of root and vine, binding the snake to the ground.

“Water, please,” Kakashi called, and the pair simultaneously wove signs, and called forward raging waves from the field’s nearby silent, but strong stream, washing them over the wriggling snake.

Again, the creature cried out from the attack, its scales sizzling as the last of Kakashi’s flames died away under the foamy, crashing of violent waves.

“I’m going to finish it off,” Kakashi hollered, brandishing a pair of kunai and leaping down onto white scales below.

In the brief stillness of Kakashi’s absence, behind Tenzo’s back, rose the rabid cry of Orochimaru to claim what he believed to be his. He swung a punch that molded itself into a brood of snakes, all hissing, with mouths open and fangs ready to plunge into Tenzo’s tender flesh. The two met just as Tenzo turned to see the attack from the corner of his eye. Thoughtful planning, however, saw to it that the snakes pierced only into splintered wood, as Tenzo’s false body transformed back into a wood clone before vanishing with a pop and a cloud of white smoke.

Orochimaru’s face recoiled with surprise, and in his pause, Kakashi burst up from the ground, having been lying in wait, and sliced through the villain’s thick arm of snakes.

“Much unlike you,” the shinobi noted. “I understand the full, true worth of Tenzo, of the Iburi Clan. Therefore, much unlike you, I have no intention of leaving him unguarded.”

At the same time, the Kakashi that had jumped down on the great white snake, exploded into loose sparks, a lightning clone that had been formed and left behind after the nin’s fireball jutsu. Lightning from the dissolved clone lit the creature’s body blue, amplified by the water that had been left behind from their water jutsu, and shocking the beast until, at last, it was defeated. The summoning released, and snake vanished in a massive cloud of smoke. 

Orochimaru growled, his torn arm of floundering, headless snakes reforming back into unharmed, white flesh. It was in this moment, that he felt the squeeze of roots binding his ankles to the ground. Tenzo smirked to have caught him off guard, regardless of how quickly Orochimaru formed his legs into slithering bodies and slipped free.

Kakashi leapt, flipping around behind Orochimaru and throwing his fists out to catch the villain before he could escape.

Orochimaru, just as sharp, countered and struck back, reforming his legs into solid flesh and bone as he met the full-force attack of Elite Captain Kakashi as if it were a morning warm up.

A flash of thought away from the onslaught traded on their battlefield, the slight half-blink of his eye, and Kakashi found himself caught, outstretched in the air against a cross of tangled snakes, as they pulled his arms wide, and bound his feet together and taut.

Defenseless, the nin bit against his agony as Orochimaru’s heel collided mercilessly with his still-fresh shoulder wound.

“Hey!” Tenzo shouted, emerging from shadow and shelter. “Leave him out of this. This is our business.”

“Tenzo, please, go back! I have this under control.”

“I would have gladly left your little shinobi out of it, but it was he who stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong,” Orochimaru contended. “Over, and over, and over…” With each reiteration, the snake struck Kakashi’s wound, his ribs, and his vulnerable stomach, hard enough to illicit a slight choked cry, and the swallowing of vomit. “He just couldn’t let us go, couldn’t hand the mission off to someone else… Now, it’s _I_ to have captured _him_ , and I fully intend to make him pay…”

Orochimaru brandished a kunai, smiling and running his tongue hungrily over the blade.

“What a beautiful irony, don’t you think?”

Before the blade could run Kakashi through, it smacked abruptly into wood and chain, flying out of its wielder’s hand and across the field into the grass.

Tenzo stood, body in front of Kakashi as an impenetrable shield, pair of nunchucks in hand, and the shining of the utmost confidence as he promised, “You'll have to get through me first.”

“Oh?” Orochimaru implored. “And is it with these new little toys that you are going to stop me? Please Kinoe, you’ve never even seen such ninja tool before in your life, much less know how to use them with any kind of efficiency.”

His nerve unflinching, Tenzo whipped the nunchucks back, trading and spinning the pair of them with a furious grace and perfect precision.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

Trying not to let his shock show, Orochimaru grit his teeth, forced into a game of counter and retreat from the onslaught coming at him. Around him, Tenzo flipped with ease, whooping and hollering as he bore into his opponent. 

Orochimaru cried against his frustration, and spewed from his mouth a mass of snakes that quickly coiled themselves over Tenzo's body. Just as they readied their fangs to pierce venom through, Tenzo yelled, booming and wild, the snakes flying off of his body as it burst into brilliant blue-green chakra glow, and popped back into his true form, The Blue Beast, Maito Gai. 

* * *

 

_Kakashi blew lightly over the steam that drifted up from his canteen before handing it over to Tenzo with a word of caution for its heat. Watching intently as Tenzo took a sip, the nin ran through a mental checklist of all he could do, and had done to attempt to breathe some strength back into the brunette’s depleted body._

_He’d assessed vitals. He treated outward physical wounds, all minor and unconcerning. He’d wetted a bit of his emergency bandages and pressed it over Tenzo’s fevered forehead. He’d used his newly refilled canteen to brew three of the chakra tea bags into an overly strong medicine with the brief heat of the tiniest fireball jutsu he’d ever managed._

_Then, he wrinkled his nose at what he knew came next._

_“I think…” he started, more than hesitant. “We should each have a few food pills.”_

_Tenzo nodded, swallowing his mouthful of tea._

_“I want to be honest with you though, about what all I have.”_

_“What do you mean?” Tenzo asked._

_He watched in curiosity as Kakashi pulled from his satchel a small bag of food pills, and then dug around within the smaller bag to procure a tiny clear box that contained a single red morsel._

_“Not all food pills are the same,” the shinobi explained. “Most are just different mixes of nutrients, vitamins, carbohydrates, protein, so-on…”_

_He opened the box and removed the red pill._

_“But some are designed to be able to grant special ability and strength. They’re expensive, and hard to get your hands on. Typically, they can only be granted, _by specific request and approval,_ to shinobi that are dispatched on missions with an 'A', or an "S" ranking. When I was assigned the mission to track down Lord Orochimaru, I applied for this pill. They call it an ‘Extra Life.’ It does just that, it brings whoever consumes it back from the brink of death into perfect, if not extreme, health and strength.”_

_“What’s the catch?”_

_Kakashi smiled. Of course Tenzo would have caught on._

_“The strength only lasts for around an hour or so, depending on how depleted the consumer was before taking it, and then after, renders the consumer unconscious for a week, or more. There has been one case where the consumer never woke.”_

_Tenzo took another swallow of tea, his hand extending once more to Kakashi._

_The nin opened his mouth, fingers tightening around the little red pill._

_“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” Tenzo interrupted. “I know if I were to try and face him in my current state, we would certainly die. This offers us a chance. I’m not afraid of the risk.”_

_He took Kakashi’s clenched fist in hand, uncurling the shinobi’s fingers._

_“I’ve been in comas far longer, for far more helpless reasons.”_

_The pill disappearedbehind his lips, washed down by the last of his overly-saturated tea._

_After a slight grimace, Tenzo inhaled through new lungs, his body lighting up warm and abuzz._

_He smiled wide, laughing a little as his legs sprung him to standing faster than he imagined possible of himself in any state of health._

_“Feel better?” Kakashi asked, unable to help his own smile at his companion’s revitalized glow._

_Tenzo effortlessly scooped up his fluffy feline, spinning him through the air, disregarding the squealed protest it elicited._

_“Completely. Now, please tend to yourself. You’ve been bleeding everywhere this whole time, and we need to go.”_

_Kakashi raised his hands in surrender before glancing down to the open wound on his shoulder. As he reached for Tenzo’s discarded, wet rag, the nin breathed in the faint scent of sweat, smoke, and weaponry, the hair on the back of his neck snapping erect._

_“Hey! Kakashi! Kinoe!”_

_"Pakuun caught us on the way back from a mission! He went ahead to dispatch your ANBU Team, but we came ahead to offer immediate backup! Are you alright?"_

_Before anyone drew their next breath, Kakashi once again swept Tenzo and Fishcake behind his protective stance, ready to reengage the forms of Gai, Asuma, and Kurenai as they sped through the trees and into sight._

_“Identify yourselves,” Kakashi demanded. “Provide proof.”_

_The three came to a halt a few meters away, panting hard and looking quizzical._

_“Rival?” Gai asked, taking a step forward._

_Kakashi’s hand lit of lightning once more, chest laboring in his over-exertion._

_“We have faced and fought you three moments ago. Imposters. Creations of Lord Orochimaru. Shape-shifters. Prove you are yourselves. Something only I would know. Now.”_

_Gai stilled, understanding, and then cracking a grin._

_“When we were children, I walked in on you taking a piss and very clearly saw your whole dick.”_

_Every eye, other than Gai’s, popped wide of utter shock. The lightning around Kakashi’s hand vanished instantly, his face burning under his mask._

_“To even the playing field,” Gai continued. “I revealed myself to you. To which you said-"_ _  
_

_“That’s quite enough- I believe it’s you!”_

_“It looked like an acorn.”_

_“Why? Why would you finish that story?!” Kakashi lamented._

_“Why are_ you _the one acting embarrassed?” The jump-suited nin questioned back. “_ I _was the one that had my dick compared to an acorn!”_

_“Gai-_ please _!”_

_“Enough, man,” Asuma chimed in, deeply sympathetic to the purple-faced, brown-haired man untucking himself from Kakashi’s cover and not knowing where to look._

_“What? He needed something to know that I was truly myself.” Gai explained. “What is more private between us than the time we assessed each other’s manhood? Besides, you never got an update after I went through puberty.”_

_Kakashi’s hands shot up in a defensive shake._

_“I don’t need an update! No one wants that update!”_

_“You had already gone through puberty! Your dick doesn’t live on in my memory as an acorn, as mine does in your memory!”_

_Ready to pull his mask over the entirety of his face to and die of complete embarrassment, Kakashi stuttered, a flustered mess begging for mercy, “It doesn’t - mine shouldn’t -"_

_“Please, please shut up, you giant, bushy-browed idiot!” Kurenai finally burst. “We’re going to get found by Orochimaru because you’re screaming about penis sizes!”_

_At this, Gai beamed with pride.  
_

_“What a thought, Kakashi! Our dicks so legendary, they summon the great Orochimaru by mention of-"_

_“I’m willing to go now!” Asuma blurted._

_Kakashi, practically steaming, nodded furiously._

_“Yes, please. Someone. Anyone.”_

_Asuma lit a new cigarette in his relief and took a long drag before sighing heavy, and offering his proof of identity._

_“A while back, when he was to resume his post as Hokage, my father had me help him sort through old records. While going through them, I found your parent’s marriage license. It had a photo of them on their wedding day attached. I set it aside, and later,petitioned my father to let you have it. I believe he snuck it into your apartment, so that you could receive it in privacy.”_

_Kakashi exhaled soft, surprised at the turn of conversation, and deeply touched at his friend’s kindness._

_“I-I didn’t know it had been you to find it…”_

_Asuma broke a crooked grin._

_“In the photo, your mother was smiling wide, holding a small bouquet of purple flowers. Your father was as strong and stoic as ever, but he wasn’t looking at the camera. Instead, he was looking on your mother from the corner of his eyes.”_

_“Asuma…” Kakashi whispered, completely at a loss. “Thank you… It is a priceless treasure to me, that came when I needed it most…”_

_For the first time in too many years, Kakashi held the eyes of his comrade. Just as touched, Asuma gave a slight nod and let his grin grow wide._

_“One time,” Kurenai said suddenly, breaking the tender silence. “I convinced you to come out and drink with us, and we got you completely shit-faced. I then got you to play ‘never-have-I-ever,’ and when I said ‘never have I ever had a sex dream about my sensei,’ you dismissed yourself for the night.”_

_All eyes snapped down on Kurenai._

_“Why?” Asuma demanded._

_“He was getting too emotional and open. I wasn’t used to it. It was making me uncomfortable. Besides, I think he believes we are all ourselves now.”_

_Exasperated, Asuma pinched the bridge of his nose and let another plume of smoke escape with a groan._

_“Well, if we’re all done talking about Kakashi’s sex life and the varying penis sizes of our teammates-"_

_“I was young and going through a lot of changes - I didn’t- I don’t - Minato-Sensei had taken our team to a hot spring - I - the subconscious is not always a fair judge of actual desire - sometimes it just puts things together and ends up severely disturbing itself!”_

_“Oh - so,_ now _puberty is a relevant factor to defending oneself?!”_

_“Can it! As much as I’d like to embarrass Kakashi until his blush literally burns through his mask, I imagine there’s a mission and a time constraint that’s far more pressing.”_

_“I’d like to reintroduce myself,” Tenzo announced, stepping forward. “Now that it’s safe to do so.”_

_The raging lunacy of their conversation calmed once more, each of the long-time friends relit with the warmth a little absurdity, embarrassment, and vulnerability could ignite._

_Tenzo looked to Fishcake in his arms, not knowing how to begin, and unnerved to be at the focused attention of so many people at once. But, time slipping fast away, the brunette steadied his breathing and simply started._

_“My name is actually Tenzo. I’ve been a prisoner of Orochimaru since I was a child, and am the only surviving member of the Iburi Clan, as well as the sole inheritor of Lord Hashirama’s Wood-Style. I’ve only just had my memory restored, and until now, believed that Orochimaru was my father, that I was named ‘Kinoe,’ and that we lived in isolation due to an unnamed illness that plagued my body. I also was conditioned to believe that all shinobi were evil and out to cause chaos and war. Fishcake was my only companion.”_

_Tenzo paused, looking over each of the shinobi that had accepted him so fully, so quickly. Here they had rushed to his aid, expressions emitting earnest outrage and concern as he recounted his past. His heart swelled in it. This is what it meant to be on a team, to have friends._

_Behind him, Kakashi’s fleeting touch ghosted over his low back, encouraging his openness and nudging him onward._

_“On his mission to track down Orochimaru, Kakashi found me and has done everything in his power to help me rediscover the truth, the treachery of the man I thought to be my father, and the goodness at the heart of what it means to be a shinobi.”_

_The two shared a brief glance, only the two of them there in each other’s eyes._

_“In the last hour,” Tenzo continued, shoulders lifting tall as he turned back to the others. “I conferred with Orochimaru, and learned that he had not only used me to obtain the Mokuton through some sort of experimentation, but that he also had been using me to stay alive unnaturally. My hair possesses some kind of supernatural healing… I guess, something that came about when I ate the last Hashirama flower and gained the Mokuton… I’m not sure, this all is new to me, too…. We discovered the healing ability works at my own expense, drawing life from my body to heal others. When Fishcake was fatally wounded in our last battle and I was able to save him by wrapping him in my hair, the dots finally connected - this is how Orochimaru has been staying alive, why he kept me as a prisoner, and it caused the ‘illness’ that I experienced constant flare-ups of… Which I realize sounds crazy…”_

_Gai snorted, raising a hand and offering, “We’re shinobi. We’ve heard crazier.”_

_The three of them moved inward, Asuma clapping a hand over Tenzo’s shoulder._

_“It’s nice to meet you, Tenzo. How are you feeling now?”_

_“Excellent. Infuriated. Overwhelmed.”_

_“I’m sure,” Asuma agreed, stamping out the last of his cigarette butt and squatting down to Fishcake’s level. “And you’re in full health, little one? Way to charge into the battlefield. Ah, sorry, I don’t have any jerky on me now…”_

_Fishcake wrinkled his prying nose and settled for the shinobi’s gentle forehead scratches and praise._

_Kurenai poured over Tenzo, causing the brunette to shrink slightly back under the intense analytics._

_“You said you saved Fishcake from a fatal wound? I thought using your hair depleted you. How are you in such good health?”_

_“He took a strong cup of chakra tea,” Kakashi explained, hesitating a moment before adding, “And my ‘Extra Life.’”_

_Kurenai turned slow and stunned._

_“Kakashi-"_

_“He told me the risks,” Tenzo interceded. “He didn’t want me to take it. But, we’re short on time. Orochimaru gave me an hour to consider whether or not I would come back to him willingly or not. In that time, he sent the shape-shifters after us to try and convince me that Kakashi had been lying to me, and to get me to come back to him. We defeated his creatures, but, the hour is nearly up, and when it is, he is fleeing and our window to catch him will be gone. We need to act now.”_

_Kurenai’s red eyes narrowed, accepting this and turning to assess Kakashi’s wounds._

_“How much time do we have?” Gai asked._

_“Five minutes, maybe.”_

_“Save your chakra,” Kakashi insisted, tugging his bloody mess of a shoulder away from the green glow of Kurenai’s hands._

_Tenzo cocked his head, filing though the archives of his reading and remembering a series of essays on medical ninjutsu._

_Kurenai rolled her eyes, digging though her satchel and growling, “Let me at least sew it.”_

_“We need to move,” Gai urged._

_Unphased by the sting of alcohol wiping his wound clean, and the quick work of needle and thread that Kurenai worked through his flesh, Kakashi pointedly countered, “We need a plan first.”_

_“You’re right,” Asuma agreed. “But, where do we even start? We’re going up against the most notorious, terrifying, overpowered villain the shinobi world has dealt with, likely since Uchiha Madara…”_

_They glanced amongst themselves, the sobriety of the situation settling heavy and hard._

_Then, Gai reached an enthusiastic arm around Tenzo’s neck, declaring with unyielding vigor, “Well, good thing we have the chosen inheritor of Lord Hashirama himself, hm?”_

_Smirk under his mask, Kakashioffered a nod of thanks to his medic as she placed a bandage over his newly stitched and disinfected shoulder._

_“Right.”_

_Without a shred of doubt left in him, Tenzo beamed._

_“A plan, then?”_

* * *

 

Gai, his chakra disguise to impersonate Tenzo having faded away with the opening of his third gate, gave a thoroughly pleased and toothy smile to the villain standing in complete stunned shock across from him. 

Orochimaru opened his mouth to ask what had just happened, and Gai was in front of him, kicking the pair of them up, into the air.

Saliva and blood burst from Orochimaru's mouth, and, probably thirty feet up, Gai popped behind and shouted into his ear, "I told you I was full of surprises, you disgusting, spineless, snake!"

Gai's arms clasped around from behind, flipping both of them to spin, head-first toward the ground, speed picking up as they plummeted.

"Omote Renge!!"

The earth an inch from their skulls, and Gai was gone, abandoning Orochimaru for the final, calamitous impact.

The ground broke apart, dirt and grass exploding outward. 

As the dust cleared, the onlooking shinobi could see that Orochimaru had dissolved into a brood of snakes to avoid absorbing the impact, and was quickly reforming across from a no longer glowing, struggling to stand Gai.

The yellow gleam of Orochimaru’s eyes squinted in suspicion as a new fog filled the air, thicker than dirt alone, gray, and stinging hot against the villain’s skin.

Flicking his hand in a sarcastic salute, Gai vanished from Orochimaru's vision, and Kakashi, immediately behind, and engaged in quick, blind, combat.

Orochimaru contended well, even unseeing though whatever smog he found himself in. But, when Kakashi gave a simple flip backward, Orochimaru found himself swinging through the misty, intangible form of a woman, gone faster than she was there.

In her place, the piercing, livid focus of Tenzo, hands clasped and summoning, up from the ground, spear after spear of wood to try and stick his false father. Orochimaru leapt back, struggling to dodge each spear.

“Careful, my flower,” he chuckled. “You nearly got me. Or is it even really you I’m facing now?”

“Oh, it’s me,” Tenzo assured, skewering a spear through Orochimaru’s shoulder from its diagonal reach in the ashy fog behind. “And I’m not your flower.”

The spear wound itself around the villain’s shoulder, yanking him backward and slamming him into the trunk of a tree. Its bark immediately enveloped him, binding Orochimaru into immobility.

Tenzo cracked a satisfied smile as Kakashi appeared suddenly behind him, fingers to thread through his own before the pair of them vanished with a flash.

Safely out of the ashen plume, Kakashi turned to check for the retreat of his friends as well. Gai, Kurenai, and Asuma stood by, and Tenzo nodded, commanding, “Do it.”

* * *

 

_“Alight let’s move out,” Kakashi ordered._

_Tenzo nuzzled Fishcake a last time before placing him in the large, open trunk of a freshly grown tree. He'd hated to have Fishcake out of sight, but refused to allow him in the sight of Orochimaru. The answer, was closing his darling pet into the huge, hollow tree he'd created, complete with a water dish and a bed of soft sprouts for the feline to rest on until his master's return._

__“Fishcake, I promise to get your master back to you. Stay here. There will be no gap for you to fill this time. I swear,_ " Kakashi promised as Tenzo sealed the truck shut. Kakashi then pulled from inside his shoe, a tiny vial of yellow liquid, opening it and splashing the contents onto the tree. _

_"It's marked now," he explained. "Even if we aren't to return, my ninken will, and they will make sure Fishcake is secured and safe."  
_

_"Thank you..."_

_"Wait, marked?" Gai wondered aloud. "You mean_ marked _, marked?"_

_Kakashi rolled his eyes._

_"They are dogs. Yes, marked."_

_"So, you mean to tell me, you're constantly carrying a vial of piss on your leg?"_

_"Hey, idiots, focus," Asuma mumbled, squelching out the last of his cigarette butt under his shoe. "Everyone good with the plan?"_

_“We went through this all pretty quickly,” Kurenai noted. “Tenzo, you have it all down?”_

_Tenzo clasped his hands together, growing outward from his body a perfect wood clone replica._

_“This clone goes ahead with Kakashi. They will confront Orochimaru directly, bringing down the tower and getting him out in the open. I stay hidden, to the side with you three, executing my Mokuton from the shadows, to make it look as though it’s really me out there and not a wood clone decoy. Kakashi and I will engage Orochimaru until a suitable time presents itself for Gai to come in, using a transformation jutsu to appear as me. He’ll release the jutsu in a fitting time to cause shock, and land a critical blow. In the wake of that blow, Asuma, Kurenai, and I will take the field. Asuma cloud the area with the start of his Burning Ash Pile Jutsu. Kurenai will catch Orochimaru in a genjutsu. I will engage and attack with wood style, so that when he is caught and bound by a tree trunk, he has no reason to doubt that it is my physical attack, instead of it truly being Kurenai’s genjutsu. Kakashi will be behind me in the smoke cover the whole time, and, once Orochimaru is caught in the genjustu tree, he will use his Teleportation Technique to get the both of us out of the smoke cloud, and Asuma will ignite the burning ash to blow Orochimaru up.”_

_Gai released a single booming laugh, impressed._

_“Well, shit,” Asuma observed. “He’s a natural.”_

_“You shouldn’t doubt him,” Kakashi finished. “Let’s go.”_

_The team nodded in unison._

_Kakashi moved to stand beside Tenzo’s wooden clone, reaching skillfully beneath his mask to snatch up and discard the chakra tea bag he’d stuffed between his cheek and teeth at the start of their recuperation._

_“I will guard you as if it is the real you,” he assured, turning then to catch true Tenzo’s wide eyes. “We can do this.”_

_Glancing between Fishcake and his silver-haired shinobi, Tenzo felt the spark of a last, dire request._

_“Wait… Kurenai, you can make him see anything in the genjutsu, right? You build the reality?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Then please, before Asuma ignites the ash, make him see Rin.”_

_Confused, Kurenai repeated, “Rin?”_

_“Tenzo, please-” Kakashi sputtered._

_“Make her be the one to set the explosion in his reality.”_

_“Tenzo…”_

_A heaviness settled over them, something that bulged in each of their throats. No one spoke of Rin. And yet, this request eluded to far more than having just spoken of the late shinobi._

_Gai opened his mouth and took the step out into a truth they’d all rather deny._

_“Orochimaru sent shape-shifters after you… He made you fight her, didn’t he, Kakashi?”_

_Kakashi’s eye fell away, his idle fingers twitching slightly of phantom flesh and lightning through his fingertips._

_“We need to go,” he said instead._

_Ready to relent in the absence of time, and the fear that they would push their friend away just as they were gaining a little ground with him, Asuma, Gai and Kurenai nearly stopped Tenzo as he crossed over to stand behind Kakashi and plead for his walls to come down a little more._

_“Hey, listen, I know you’d rather just try to forget about it and push on, but that doesn’t work. You know it doesn’t work.”_

_Kakashi ground his teeth._

_“And,” Tenzo continued, softening to the suffocating helplessness he’d felt bound to watch the nin he’d grown to care so deeply as he’d been forced to relive the nightmares of his past again in flesh and blood. “The personal cruelty of using her against you is not one I will just forgive or forget. We’re bringing him to justice, Kakashi.”_

_For a brief moment, Kakashi’s long-time companions held their breath, floored by the bravery and grace with which Tenzo trail-blazed through the emotional scar tissue that had so long stunted Kakashi’s healing and kept him from intimacy. Then, Gai, smiling wide with every one of his brilliant white teeth gleaming, stepped forward and clapped a hand to Tenzo’s shoulder. Asuma and Kurenai followed suit, coming up to stand with their new comrade, and to shuffle in a little closer after Kakashi._

_“I’ll make sure she’s there,” Kurenai promised. “After all, they are all really with us in some way or another, hm?”_

_Glancing over his shoulder, Kakashi’s heart swelled, filled with a warmth sweeter than he felt he’d ever deserve a the sight of his teammates, old and new, standing there in complete solidarity._

_“Yah, I suppose you’re right…” Kakashi managed. “Let’s go…”_

_He turned slowly to face them, broken smile christening quivering lips._

_“Thank you…”_

 

* * *

 

Through the haze, a silhouette emerged, small and mighty, head held high, as she struck a match over her hitai-ate. The tiny orange glow grew closer, as her frame did to the squinting eyes of Orochimaru.

All at once, the shinobi came into view, the precious, ferocious memory of Nohara Rin, eyes burning of a vengeance menacing enough to make even the monster’s blood run cold.

“How dare you use me against him.”

The ash cloud around them lit, white, blazing heat in an instant explosive flash. Orochimaru, standing defenseless in a false hold, with a terror very real, in the center of the inferno, swallowed in flame.

From the outside, Tenzo held his breath.

Kakashi fell to his knees, exhausted, Kurenai drawing up behind him quickly and pressing her hands to his back to wash them with the green glow of medical ninjutsu.

“Save your chakra, this may not be over yet.”

“Shut up.”

Grimacing, Kakashi shot a look to Gai, who wordlessly understood and crossed to stand guard beside Tenzo.

Slowly, the smoke began to clear, clumps of grass and dirt scattering over the field. Laying out, over the scorched earth, the motionless body of Orochimaru, charred and sizzling as a dying ember.

The image struck as a blade through Tenzo, and forced from his lips the automatic, grieving whisper…

“Father…”

Kakashi stood, shaking Kurenai off.

“That is good for now. Thank you.”

He exhaled, senses stretching thin into a twisted, tense, readiness, and made his way out to observe the body.

Each step felt as though Kakashi were marching further into the impossible, and further in toward his death. Tenzo longed to cry out, feeling again the rising scream of his people through his burning lungs. Exclaiming joyous retribution, or crying out in desperate warning, he could not decide.

Orochimaru, dead at Kakashi’s feet, the answer made itself explicitly clear - warning.

With a sudden jerk, the body flopped, limp and lifeless, in the grass, as if Orochimaru’s soul were somehow trying to escape the imprisonment of his fresh carrion. Something else entirely made its escape instead.

Kakashi narrowed his eyes, the swirl of his tomoe trying to accept what he believed he was seeing. He gasped, quickly popping a lightning clone into existence and leaving it behind to guard his back as his true self fled back to the company of his comrades.

“Brace! Something is coming.”

No sooner had the words left Kakashi’s lips, did a slimy, white, clawing hand reach out from the throat of Orochimaru’s corpse. It extended upward, the body continuing to writhe in the grass as the hand grew into an arm, stretching the dead mouth open until the jaw cracked, making way for the new, dripping, form Orochimaru, very much alive, and cackling of wicked amusement.

Tenzo bit against vomit, frozen in horror.

How foolish he’d been, to think they had a chance in hell to bring this master down.

“I-I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…I-"

“Tenzo,” Asuma appealed, crossing over to lay a hand on the brunette’s shoulder. “I know you’re new to the field, but you should know, plans, even for the most elite shinobi, hardly ever get the job done on the first try. You have nothing to apologize to us for. And if you’re apologizing to him, fuck that.”

Broken from the spell of his terror, Tenzo turned to meet Asuma’s face as he raised questioning eyebrows.

Tenzo nodded, looking back to Kakashi, and willing him to reach them faster. 

“What next, then?”

From across the field, Orochimaru’s new body had completely emerged, and was slowly uncurling into a full stand.

“You clever children,” he sneered. "You would have had me there!"

Kakashi reached his teammates, chest heaving, as his clone across the field drew a kunai.

“There’s a chance he’s vulnerable now, weakened. This could either be a golden opportunity, or the final warning that this fight is unwinnable.”

“So,” Gai mused. “The stakes haven’t changed from the beginning?”

Kakashi smirked.

“I suppose not.”

Across the way, Kakashi’s clone engaged, quick with vicious taijutsu to try and stop the weaving of signs from his opponent. Orochimaru held no hesitation and wove his signs between dodge and swing. His hand slammed into the charred ground under his feet, sending out a wave of inked symbols with a cry.

“Kuchiyose no Jutsu!"

Up from the ground, creaking and slow, grew nearly one hundred of Orochimaru’s created beings, white-skinned and wide-mouthed, with a gleam of bloodlust through the glow of their yellow eyes.

“He’s going to try and hide among them. Make his escape,” Kakashi predicted.

“Then he truly is weakened. If he’s going to retreat,” Tenzo concluded, lighting with hope.

Kakashi nodded, catching the brunette’s eye, entreating, “You and I?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Go get him,” Gai smiled. “We’ll handle the others.”

“They transform, and are proficient in taijutsu, but showed no ability to execute ninjutsu, or genjutsu. Land a critical blow and they burst into trees, defeated.”

“Thank you,” Kurenai said. “Go give him hell.”

The team shared a quick nod and burst into action.

Asuma drew a pair of blades, clenching fists through the unique finger-holes, and lighting them with a buzz of blue chakra. Kurenai vanished into thin air. Gai exploded into his trademark burst of blue-green, shouting loud and eager. Kakashi and Tenzo sped forward, stride in-sync, through the charge of clamoring creatures, towards the villain that stood just in front of his own corpse as he melted slowly into the earth.

At the same time, every last creature on the battlefield began to transform, white bodies taking on the form of their creator.

“Tenzo, run your roots through the ground to find him!” Kakashi yelled.

Tenzo immediately dropped into a squat, hand to the dirt, sending out a mass of roots to thread quickly through mud and earth until finding, and seizing Orochimaru as he tried to make his escape.

Pulling the roots up with a grunt and a spray of dirt, Orochimaru was forced back above ground to find Kakashi flying through the air above him, and a handful of lighting screaming towards his chest. The two met with a rumble of thunder, but the villain’s body melted into mud, an earth-style clone.

Just as Kakashi ripped his hand free, Tenzo called for aid, his false father having crept behind him during his little diversion and attempted to seize the teen. He then, found himself caught between the focused and furious taijutsu onslaught of both Kakashi and Tenzo. Hand to hand, fist to fist, each shinobi managed to counter the other. The experienced elite, the untrained rookie, and expertly wicked, all panting hard and unable to blink.

A mistimed swing, and Tenzo found Orochimaru’s foot colliding against his gut, knocking the wind from him and sending him tumbling backward over the grass.

“Tenzo!” Kakashi cried.

But the brunette was back on his feet, throwing out from his arm a barrage of expanding branches towards Orochimaru.

“Mokuton: Daijurin no Jutsu!"

Orochimaru turned, startled and forced to leap back.

Kakashi’s hands threw through signs, pounding into the ground with just enough time to erect an earth wall behind the villain as he slammed backward into it. There, he was pinned down with the extension of Tenzo’s wood-style, and unable to dodge as Kakashi’s lightning blade came once more for him, this time stabbing through the back of his earth wall and through Orochimaru’s heart.

Instead of a spray of blood and flesh, Orochimaru’s body burst into a hundred white snakes that quickly slithered away and reformed into his haggard body.

The three stood, exhausted and evaluating for a moment as chaos continued around them.

“You can continue to come at me with the same tricks all night, but you are never going to see victory here,” Orochimaru taunted.

“Stop leaving the same openings then,” Kakashi replied, smug and smooth through the pant of his breath.

Orochimaru laughed, loud and wheezed.

“How wildly, stupidly arrogant you really are, Kakashi. You might have been able to impress a desperate, naive child with the smoke and mirrors around your few talents, but, there’s no fooling a true master of jutsu.”

“In the years I've spent hunting you, I've become a bit of a master in my own right. And my mastery didn't require leeching off of others."

Snarling, Orochimaru let his hands clap together to weave his offense, not missing the focused burn of his opponent’s Sharingan, and the way Kakashi matched the hand sign in perfect synchronicity.

Then, the both of them simultaneously shouted, “Raiton: Hebi Mikazuchi!”

Each of their hands exploded of yellow charge, lightning that formed itself into the rising body of a striking stake. The attacks met midair, wrestling brief and bright before bursting bright and thundering loud.

As the rumble echoed, Orochimaru clasped his hands in a new sign, calling out his next jutsu, sucking in a massive breath, and releasing a series of Wind Style air bullets.

Nimble and fast as the lightning he manipulated so well, Kakashi leapt away from the succession of bullets whizzing through the air, landing with his palms to the ground to pull up a mud wall and shield the last of the wind shots.

Orochimaru paused, curious and amused.

“You’re not going to copy that one?”

“Unfortunately, the Wind Release chakra nature is not mine to wield,” Kakashi explained, withdrawing his mud wall back into the earth. “Throw me any of the others, and I’ll be happy to keep matching them.”

“You truly think you can keep up?”

Kakashi shrugged, voice flat and sounding bored as ever as he answered, “Probably.”

Indignation mounting, Orochimaru held no further hesitation with the weaving of his hands, irate to see Kakashi keeping pace with his speed and, again, shouting at the same time as him.

“Suiton: Ja no Kuchi!”

Gushing up from the stream to their side, two enormous snake heads of water rose, jaws open and hissing with the rush of frothy water. They struck inward, colliding with an epic splash and a shower upon the entire field. A moment locked in their typhoon, and the twin snake heads destroyed one another, soaking all below.

Drenched and dripping, Kakashi smarted, “Ah, another ranged attack, and with a snake theme, too...”

At this Orochimaru lost himself to rage, charging toward Kakashi, who gladly ran to meet him in the middle. The two blurred together in unrelenting taijutsu, Kakashi, again not to miss the sudden and immediate clasp of Orochimaru’s hands, and match the villain in his next attack.

“Suiton: Suigadan!"

The water beneath them molded instantaneously from cool liquid,into shooting water spikes. Both shinobi leapt to avoid the pierce, wasting no time in the air, and sending out a dozen shuriken, with hands quick to weave new signs behind their flight. Kakashi stayed in perfect time, igniting his shuriken with blazing breath, just as a seething Orochimaru did.

The flaming weapons collided, flying off every which way, their wielder’s thrown back from the force of their own blasts and sliding against muddy ground.

Nearly at his temper's end, Orochimaru made a split-second decision to try and weed Kakashi out.

He meant to land a suicide strike, raising the earth up around himself to catch and crush his own body between it, only to slip to safety at the last moment. If Kakashi continued in his flawless copying, he would destroy himself. Orochimaru hoped, the speed it took to mirror every move, restricted Kakashi from any other analytics, and it would be enough to end this ridiculous duel and heap shame over the shinobi for error of his arrogance.

Kakashi matched his sign.

“Doton: Sando no Jutsu!"

The earth sprang up around both men, closing quickly, and Orochimaru’s black heart leapt.

“Kakashi!!” Tenzo cried, flying forward with abandon as dust flew and the ground shook, the attack finishing and slamming both nin between their own, respective walls of earth.

“No…”

From behind Tenzo, a chuckle drifted up with the re-materializing form of Orochimaru as he rose up from his hiding place underground.

“It had to be done, Kinoe… But, you’ll forgive me when your head clears.”

“I’m going to doubt that.”

Orochimaru turned with just enough time to catch a blade against the swing of Kakashi’s.

“How?!”

“Kakashi!”

The nin smirked.

“What, you can vanish at the last second and I can’t? I thought I was supposed to be beating you with your own moves.”

Orochimaru bellowed in his unrestrained rage, throwing his arms open and sending Kakashi back from him. Before the nin could find his footing, roots caught his hands and feet from underneath him, pulling him taut and forcing out a pained groan.

“Where’s your cheap imitation of his, Kakashi? No means to match a true master?” Orochimaru bellowed, the length of a thorny spear emerging from his palm. "Oh, I forget. You're pathetic attempt at mastery lacks the brilliance of the Mokuton!" 

The villain leapt up, soaring toward a helpless Kakashi.

Wood met wood, however, shattering into splinters.

Tenzo caught the stunned eyes of the man he had, for so long, called father, shield of wood grown out from his arm to catch the spear’s blow.

“He needs no Mokuton,” Tenzo asserted. “ _I_ am his mokuton.”

Tenzo sent Orochimaru back in a tumble, turning to catch Kakashi has he fell, limp and heaving from his fallen binds.

“Are you alright?”

Kakashi gave a nod, exhaustion crashing over him in stifling waves. 

“Rest, you big show off,” Tenzo instructed, kneeling slow to set his wasted companion to sit. “I’ll take things from here.”

“Tenzo,” Kakashi gasped, catching the brunette’s hand as he stood.

The two met each other’s eyes, swollen and strained.

“Go get him, princess.”

Smile spread wide over his sweat-streaked, grimy face, Tenzo turned back to face Orochimaru.

“Oh, Kinoe,” Orochimaru laughed, amusement-laden pity overtaking him. “Bravery is one thing, but this is suicidal. I suppose Hatake really has been making his impact on you...”

“Shut up!” Tenzo answered, a calm confidence settling through his shoulders and the even flow of his breath. “No more of your mockery and manipulation. I won’t be a puppet to them any more. If you want to recapture me, to make me your prisoner again, then you’re going to have to swallow your fear and fight me for real.”

“Swallow my fear? Believe me, my flower, it is you that should be afraid.”

“Oh, I am,” Tenzo admitted, his hand flexing into a fist at his side. “I’m terrified of you. You are treacherous, and god-like, and I struggle to even look you in the eye now.”

He exhaled, steadying himself, and going on.

“But, I also know, that you are afraid of me.”

Orochimaru balked.

“Why else would you choose to psychologically imprison me? Why make me believe you love me? That I’m ill? Weak? Why convince me my power is useless, when you could have trained me as a weapon?”

Having heard enough, Orochimaru ran forward, slamming a blade deep into Tenzo’s wooden shield, unable to withdraw it for further use and finding himself staggered back again.

He would listen. He would finally listen. Tenzo would make him face himself in the mirror.

“I’ll tell you why - you’re afraid of that weapon being turned back on yourself. You know, if you physically restrained me, I am strong enough to break free. You know, if you trained me to fight your battles for you, I could turn and overwhelm you.”

“Enough!”

Orochimaru came in again, the fullness of his taijutsu against Tenzo, who stood to counter it all.

“You had to break me down heart and soul,” Tenzo continued through their duel. “Because you knew, you’ve always known, that I’ve always been able to overcome you.”

A white fist sank into Tenzo’s stomach, knocking him to the ground.

“You need me!” Orochimaru roared, bringing his heel into the brunette’s ribs.

Taking up a fistful of Tenzo’s hair, he pulled the teen to his face, spitting, “You will always need me!”

Panting as he hung inch from the villain’s face, Tenzo relished at the warmth that settled through his soul, finally at peace within himself.

“No, you’re a parasite, and you need me.”

Orochimaru reared back, slamming their skulls together and tossing Tenzo aside.

His fingers drug through the dirt as his they clenched, summoning the strength to stand again and smear the blood on his forehead away from foggy the sight of Orochimaru in complete frantic rage.

The villain tore forward, fists flying, and Tenzo guarded as best as he could, body feeling sharper and lighter than ever despite the throb in his head and the odds that were still stacked so high against him.

It was an impossible fight, to face this undying infamy that had obliterated clans, and overwhelmed entire battlefields singlehandedly. Even if experience and trained skill were on his side, Tenzo would likely still find himself in defeat, or at least drained to the bone as Kakashi had been. But Tenzo fought on, continually struck to the ground, only to stand up and raise his hands again. And with each rise, with each growth of Orochimaru’s desperation, Tenzo’s smiled, knowing, no matter the moment when he would no longer have the physical strength to get back up, he had already won.

“Stay down, Kinoe!”

“Not a chance.”

Spitting a mouthful of blood to the ground, Tenzo grew for himself two rods from his palms and charged back in.

“You can beat me an inch from death. You can steal me away again. You can hide me. You can torture me. You can use me until I have nothing left to gove. But I will never, _ever_ stop fighting you, now. I know who I am, and that grants me freedom, that grants me strength, that grants me life enough.”

“You spoiled brat!” Orochimaru scolded. “You think you’ve had it so terrible. Believe me, you have no idea of the suffering I can inflict!”

Slow and sinister, his neck began to rise, extending upward in an unnatural slither through the air.

“Nor have you even had a glimpse of the almighty monster I truly am...”

His fangs dripped of purple poison, licked clean with a menacing hiss.

“Tenzo!” Kakashi shouted from the side, attempting to pull to his feet as a pair of clone creatures broke through the advances of their teammates to stop any aid from the struggling silver-haired shinobi.

Gai called for his rival at the sight, attempting to charging through his opposition, and held at bay my the dozens of remaining clones that flooded the path of the Blue Beast.

Crying out, Tenzo mustered the strength to throw Orochimaru back and grow his rods into spears, screaming forward with the pair of them.

“Tenzo!” Kakashi exclaimed again, more desperate than before. “It’s not him! Shadow clone!”

The strangled warning barely passed through Tenzo’s ears, not quite reaching the teen’s consciousness until the long wrap of Orochimaru’s neck surrounded his body, and fangs sunk into the meat of his shoulder.

Panic clouded instinct for a moment of helpless struggle and burning pain as his body started too numb. Tenzo sucked in a sharp breath, snapping back into self control, and sending out the barrage of wooden spikes from his back that he’d used to break free in his fight with the shape-shifters. Orochimaru’s shadow clone popped into white smoke, releasing Tenzo to fall to his knees and gasp for air. Numbness spread with an icy burn through his veins, and it took every once of his remaining strength to turn his bleeding neck and catch the sight of a nightmare as it burst into reality. Behind Kakashi, as he slashed sloppily through the creature bearing in on him, the wailing head of Orochimaru broke through the earth, mouth open too wide, and from it, the unmistakable silver gleam of a sword reaching forward, faster than the nin could dodge.

Gai howled from across the way. His teammates turned in horror. The field fell still and silent. Only the sound of broken flesh and bone remained, and the gurgled gasp of Kakashi as the sword rammed into his back, running him through, and coming out through the front of his ribs with a spray of red.

Orochimaru rose through the ground, lifting Kakashi with him, skewered on his sword, up into the air. The snake sniggered, withdrawing his blade and letting the shinobi fall heavy into the dirt.

Tenzo screamed against the immobility of his limbs, shaking, as a single tear slipped out from wide, unaccepting eyes.

“I told you, Kinoe. I told you again, and again, and again. You are not strong enough for this wicked shinobi world. And now look what your weakness has done…"

The earth shook beneath him with the full brevity of his grief.

No poison, no weakness, no inexperience, or odds, or level of villainy that stood in his way, nothing would keep him from resurrecting the man he’d come to love.

Roots wriggled their way their way through the rumble, tiny at first but growing quick, out from around the brunette. Larger ones snapped upward, twisting as they grew, multiplying until they covered the entirety of the field, up under the feet of his teammates, coiling around the feet of their remaining adversaries, and slapping hard around the white wrist of Orochimaru as he reached toward Kakashi’s fallen body.

“You will not touch him again.”

Orochimaru slipped his hand into the form of a snake and slithered it free of Tenzo’s hold.

Cradled in a bed of freshly grown moss, Kakashi managed to turn enough to catch a glimpse of his brunette across the way, weakly moaning Tenzo’s name.

“Kinoe-"

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear you speak ever again!”

The ground shook harder than before, Tenzo’s body glowing of yellow chakra burn, hair rising with it, skin flashing with the dark, unmistakable sage markings of a young Hashirama The First.

“You’re finished here.”

All at once the entire field erupted into the gnarled depths of a forest floor. Enormous roots, massive, multiplying tree trunks, all compounding with the breaking of the earth and the a roar that echoed back to the heart of the Leaf Village.

His teammates leapt forward, navigating quick through the rapid growth, ducking through the whip of vine and expansion of wood, until they reached the edge of Tenzo’s destruction, Gai snatching up Kakashi from his lifted bed of green along the way. At the same time, every last creature in Orochimaru’s image became caught and crushed in the undergrowth, each of them adding to the foliage in their own explosion thereafter. And, the monster himself, Orochimaru, found himself skewered from every which angle, unable to phase away, unable to melt into a brood of snakes and slither away, bones broken, innards pierced, flesh torn, by a bouquet of thorny spears that constricted around the villain until he finally screeched in utter agony.

“Please, Kinoe!”

“If you’re going to beg, at least use my real name!”

Orochimaru choked over the word, pride gagging over the surrender as the binds tightened around and through him, tearing him apart.

“Tenzo…” he rasped, blood pouring from the name and body wringing into an inhuman mass of putrid crimson. He flashed dying yellow eyes to sear a last time into Tenzo, challenging, “You’d really try to kill your own father?”

Tenzo raised his hand, reaching toward the suffering snake within his grasp.

“You’re not my father.”

His hand closed into a fist, and with it, the thorned spears though Orochimaru tightened their last, crushing the snake in a burst of blood and body fluid, and a last strangled gasp of breath.

His body hung limp, mouth open, yellow eyes glassy and unblinking.

Tenzo exhaled, a chill running down his spine and rocking his knees unsteady. His golden glow faded away, along with his sage markings.

He swallowed hard. He’d done it.

Though he wondered, if it was actually, somehow over.

Kakashi’s soft groan brought him back from shock and into absolute urgency.

“Kakashi!”

In an instant, Tenzo knelt at the side the shinobi that lay, drenched in his own blood, skin washed a sickly gray, veins bulging of purple strain, with Kurenai’s medical chakra glowing over him.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

“Don’t be…” Kakashi managed. “What you just did… incredible…”

“Save your breath,” Kurenai barked.

Tenzo ran a hand through sweaty, knotted silver hair.

“What’s his status?”

The medical nin couldn’t bring herself to meet Tenzo’s eyes, nor could she get the truth past her quivering lips.

“It’s poison, Tenzo,” Kakashi whispered for her.

“I told you to shut up.”

“Beyond the fatal strike through his body from the sword, he’s been poisoned,” Asuma finished. “It is one we have no record of, or antidote for. Even with a proper lab, and infinite time, there’s no telling if an antidote could even be made. Kurenai has been holding off the spread, and keeping him from bleeding out, but there’s not much else we can do, and… she can’t hold him forever…”

“Move, I can heal him with my hair!”

“No!” Kakashi protested weakly. “It will kill you to try and heal something like this, especially after all you’ve just done.”

“I don’t care! Let me do this. I can do this.”

Kurenai looked from Tenzo’s pleading eyes down to Kakashi for some kind of direction, not wanting to step away at all, furious with herself for not being able to do more.

Giving a tiny nod to the kunoichi, Kakashi offered a smile up to Tenzo.

“Come here…”

Kurenai’s green glow faded away, and Asuma helped her to her feet, wrapping her in a protective arm as she stood. Gai ground his teeth, turning away, tears steaming his face in silent anguish. They all had known Kakashi far too long to believe that he would allow Tenzo to risk his life trying to heal him. They knew he’d called the brunette over to say goodbye.

Tenzo reached up to pull his braid around, his hand caught by Kakashi’s and pulled close to the the shinobi’s struggling whisper of a heartbeat.

Kakashi’s other hand brushed briefly over Tenzo’s cheek, before it lost the last of its strength and fell again to his side.

Behind them, in the aftermath of Tenzo’s Mokuton assault, Orochimaru’s body twitched.

A single, white snake flopped from his open mouth and to the ground.

The team froze, terror taking them all as the snake was joined by another, and then another, and another and another, until the corpse’s mouth vomited the scaly, squirming creatures endlessly, Orochimaru’s mouth stretching wide and ripping at the cheeks with the outpouring. The most disturbing, however, was the way in which the snakes merged together, hundreds of them forming into the body of one, massive, looming, hissing snake.

Tenzo nearly vomited, himself at the sight, falling further and faster from the height of his victory. 

“It’s not possible… He can’t… He can’t be killed…”

“Tenzo, look at me,” Kakashi called.

Finally, with every last snake drained out of Orochimaru’s now withered husk of a corpse, and molded into the demon before them, the head of the monster formed. It was Orochimaru’s face as Tenzo had seen so many years ago, his nose smoothed into slits, scales over his skin, fangs curling out of a pointed snout, and thin, reaching tongue flicking rapid, and thirsting for blood.

Tenzo pulled his eyes away, amazed to see Kakashi's calm fearlessness, looking so loving back up at him.

“It’s going to be okay.”

“Let me heal you. We can do this together.”

Again Kakashi stilled Tenzo’s hand as it reached for braided brown, the nin’s breath paper-thin.

“We’ve both fought hard enough against him…”

“Kakashi!”

Above them, in a spine-chilling roar, Orochimaru’s final form cackled in wicked pride.

“You foolish children! You think that is all the fight I have to offer? How dare you think you could challenge me and walk away so easily?”

Drawing weapons, Kurenai, Asuma and Gai stood in ready protection over their comrades.

“Do you trust me?” Kakashi asked, soft and serious, the eyelid over his Sharingan lifting once more to capture Tenzo’s breathless expression as he smiled, confident through the chaos. 

“Without a doubt.”

Beaming, Kakashi gave new orders, not looking away from Tenzo’s eyes for a second.

“Kurenai, go back to where Fishcake is hidden. He’s going to need medical attention.”

Kurenai nodded, her faith in Kakashi overriding her confusion, and sped away.

“Kakashi?” Tenzo asked, just as lost.

The shinobi gripped suddenly onto his brunette’s beautiful, knotted, mess of a braid, pulling it taut, and whispering, “Forgive me.”

With his other hand, in a smooth, seamless motion, Kakashi ran a kunai up through the dense plaiting, severing every last lengthy strand all at once.

Tenzo gasped wildly, heart flashing through a million emotions.

Above them, Orochimaru’s monstrous form wailed to the moon, writhing against an unnamed agony. As it tumbled, shaking the ground around them, the body lost snakes by the brood, clumps of hissing white falling, crumpled and dead. The body dissolved in full, head blaring out a last, strangled cry and stilling along with the broken pile of snake bodies.

Weightlessness overwhelmed Tenzo, and he knew, this time it was over. It was finally over. He was free.

Turning back to Kakashi’s smirking, relieved face, Tenzo stuttered in astounded shock.

“How-how-when did-what?”

“It's really just not even fair, you know? Even with my botch-job cutting it, you look so ridiculously incredible with short hair.”

“How did you know that would work?” Asuma demanded. 

“Orochimaru told Tenzo that he fell into a coma when he tried to cut a piece of his hair. But-" His explanation came to a sudden halt, interrupted by a violent cough.

Tenzo cradled Kakashi’s body as it shook.

“Easy...” he soothed, trying to focus more on the riddle of Orochimaru’s death, than the poison circulating Kakashi’s veins. “The coma wasn’t related to my hair at all, was it? Telling me that cutting it caused a coma was just a scare tactic to keep it healthy and well. He induced my coma to obtain my Mokuton, and when he discovered what my hair could do, he tried to take that too... Cutting it un-does its healing ability... that’s why he needed me alive and well... he needed my hair healthy and on my head in order to use it to remain immortal...”

The others nodded, understanding alongside Tenzo.

“Fishcake!” Tenzo blurted suddenly, realizing that if healing were undone for Orochimaru, that it would also be undone for his precious pet.

“I sent Kurenai,” Kakashi reminded him, in a torn whisper.

“Kakashi... thank you... but, I can't... I can’t heal you now...”

A heaviness settled over the men, looking down into their comrade’s fading eyes.

“It’s okay,” Kakashi promised. “My only regret, is that you might bear grief... But, you’re free, that is more than worth it... Besides, this was my dream, remember? To die for my friends...”

Tenzo squeezed his eyes against the fresh sting of tears, shaking his head.

“Bit of a shame though...” Kakashi started again, his whisper tiny, tender, and just for Tenzo. “You were becoming my new dream...”

A sob shook free of Tenzo, tears streaming down muddy cheeks as he confessed to the shinobi in his arms, “You were mine...”

The two nuzzled in together, savoring a last moment and Kakashi’s breathing drew more desperate, and erratic.

“Asuma... Gai...”

The Blue Beast fell to his knees beside his rival, crying silent but strong, clasping a hand with Kakashi’s.

“My dearest friends... Thank you for never giving up on me...”

A last bought of coughing shook Kakashi’s chest mercilessly, forcing the last of his air out of his lungs, and leaving him, with a last wheeze, still and cold, eyes wide, and unblinking.

Asuma turned away, his cigarette falling absently from his fingers to his feet.

Gai squeezed his the limp hand of his best friend against his chest, bawling of unspeakable grief.

And Tenzo, overcome, rest his head against his savior’s unbeating heart and sobbed.

“I’m so sorry… Please… Come back… Kakashi…”

It was an impossible moment for him, to finally know truth, to have freedom, and yet to feel more helpless than he had throughout their entire journey.

Kurenai jogged up, Fishcake tucked tight in her arms, slowing as she realized what scene played out before her. She knelt behind Tenzo, forcing herself to look at the lifeless body of her life-long friend. Fishcake, still a little weary from the fresh healing of his reopened wounds, crawled out from Kurenai’s hold, and over to brush against his master. Tenzo pulled him in close, whimpering his name as the cat whined, paw extending for Kakashi.

Tears dripped down from Tenzo’s nose, his cheeks and into Kakashi’s wound.

Then, as the two met, blood and tears, something miraculous. 

Yellow, glittering sparks drifted up from the opening, bringing with it the soft golden glow that had engulfed Tenzo only moments ago.

Tenzo stilled, opening his eyes to the growing brightness before him. He held his breath. The shimmer spread, in swirling traces of sunshine under Kakashi’s skin, out from his wound and over his chest.

“Guys…” Kurenai managed, awed and afraid.

Asuma glanced over his shoulder, turning as his eyes caught the spread of glittering gold further over Kakashi’s body. In his own realization, Gai released his rival’s hand, withdrawing slightly to give way for whatever beautiful mystery was unfolding.

The heavenly radiance covered Kakashi’s body, in intricate, marvelous, swirling patters, like ivy grown over stretching ivory. He swelled in light as hope swelled through Tenzo’s chest. And, as the curling twist of warmth climbed its way up Kakashi’s throat and over his face, it brought with it a huge, waking breath of life, and reignited new consciousness to the fallen shinobi.

Tenzo blinked against tears, not able to fully believe the sight before him, his beloved back from the dead in his arms.

“Kakashi…”

Kakashi smiled, still shaking off death’s cobwebs as he steadied gasps for air into a rhythmic rise and fall of his whole and healed chest.

“My Tenzo… thank you…”

“Kakashi!” Tenzo exclaimed, laughing slightly as exuberance overtook him, his tears turning from anguish into put joy. Without a thought, he threw his body atop Kakashi’s, slamming his lips, passionate and nearly painful, into the the black spandex over the nin’s mouth.

Kakashi stiffened in shock, and Tenzo’s eyes snapped open wide, remembering their mixed company and suddenly feeling wildly embarrassed.

“I’m-I’m sorry…” Tenzo stammered, his body flushing, hot and pink. “I’m just-I’m so glad you’re-”

“What have I told you, princess,” Kakashi interrupted, tilting Tenzo’s eyes back to meet his with the touch of his fingers under the brunette’s chin. His hand moved to caress Tenzo’s cheek, swiping a tear away in the process. “About apologizing for things you have no reason to be sorry for…?”

Tenzo exhaled a soft laugh, and Kakashi, confidently lifting his unoccupied hand to pull his mask down to meet his neck, brought their lips together a second time, this time, proper, uninhibited, intoxicating.

Tenzo nearly melted there atop the nin’s lap, having Kakashi's mouth move into his, tender lips savoring his own in the sweetest of kisses. He swooned into the perfect affection, and into Kakashi’s tightening grasp.

The two likely would have lost themselves there, were it not for the soft clearing of Kurenai's throat that brought them back into reality and the company of precious comrades around them.

Breaking apart, the two felt no shame as the kunoichi poked fun.

“You know, for all the times that we’ve tried to make you comfortable to let your mask down around us, this is not what we meant.”

Asuma chuckled, wiping his eyes.

Kakashi only shrugged, sarcastically offering, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Alternatively, Gai squealed, the flow of his tears reinvigorated.

“Kakashi!” He rejoiced, eyes nearly popping into hearts. “You’re alive and well - and you’re showing us all of you - you’re unashamed in your love - and, you’ve been undeniably, secretly, stunningly gorgeous this whole time!!!”

He threw his arms around his comrade, nearly crushing him with a wrestled embrace as he carried on.

“The power of youth is so strong in you, my eternal rival!!”

Tenzo scooted off of Kakashi’s lap, falling into laughter with the rest of his teammates as they watched embarrassment finally settle over their friend.

The sight slowed through Tenzo’s eyes, one part in a capturing of the memory, and another part in the fogging of his vision and the heaviness of his mind. A chill fell over his body, starting from the top of his head and seeping down to his toes.

Kakashi realized the shift and broke free of Gai’s hold with just enough time to catch Tenzo’s body as it fell, heavy and spent.

“Hey, I’ve got you. It’s okay,” the shinobi assured, the others drawing near at the sudden change.

“Kakashi, what’s happening?”

“This is all normal. It’s the fading of the Extra Life’s power. The time has run out. You’re going to fall unconscious, and probably for a few days, but it’s going to be alright.”

Tenzo managed a nod, remembering, and peace resettling through his spirit. As black spotted his vision, he couldn’t help but smile, wondering again if the sight he was seeing could possibly be his reality.

Over him, Gai, Asuma, and Kurenai nodded in their own assurances that they would look after their him. Fishcake, having climbed up on his master’s chest, peered up with concern. And, Kakashi held him close, care, admiration and tender fondness over his face as he brushed a gentle thumb over the teen’s cheek.

“Let yourself rest, Tenzo. We’ll get you home.”

How impossible it was, to be there, the remnants of the tower, of the man he’d called father, his hair, his life of lies to be surrounding him in a thousand broken pieces. And how incandescent, the mosaic that the shattered pieces would come together and form. Such beauty lie ahead on the horizon of the rising sun around them. 

Tenzo smiled over the shinobi, over his teammates, his beloved friends.

“Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (at least) one more chapter after this one - thanks for sticking with me this far! Hope you're enjoying it!


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